Saturday, January 31, 2009

What is Akamai?-Free Investment Analysis

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Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides technology solutions for advanced content and application delivery over the internet. The company was formed in 1998 by MIT graduate Daniel Lewis with the help of Tom Leighton, Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan.

The company provides services to businesses, government agencies and other enterprises to help them perform effectively in their online businesses. Akamai has created an operating environment on the web which allows their client’s web pages to manage demands...click here to read the rest.

What is Zara?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Amancia Ortega founded Zara, a flagship clothing company of Inditex Group, in 1975. Zara is headquartered in A Coruña, Spain and is the world’s second largest clothing retailer. The first Zara featured low priced imitations of popular fashions which proved very successful and gave birth to the Zara of today.

Ortega started the business forty-four years ago with the help of his wife by making lingerie and gowns in his living room. Since then, it has grown to a company with...click here to read the rest.

Friday, January 30, 2009

What is GameFly?-FREE Investment Analysis

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GameFly was born when avid gamers Sean Spector and Jung Suh (founders) felt that renting a game at a video store provided a very limited library and not enough time to judge the game without spending too much on fees. To solve this problem they created their own videogame rental company following the business model set forth by Netflix. This business now dominates the online video game rental industry. They have easily succeeded in their goals to recreate the videogame rental service.

GameFly, just like Netflix, sends games to subscribers via the postal service with pre-paid return shipping. The gamers can keep the game...click here to read the rest.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

What is LegalZoom?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Legalzoom, the national leader in producing online legal documents, has been able to utilize impressive growth largely due to the way it uses technology to alter aspects of the clunky, time consuming, and expensive legal system in place today. Today the company has over 60 employees and over 5 million dollars in revenue and has enormous potential to continue to expand in a very profitable market.

Brian Lee, the co-founder and chairman of LegalZoom.com came up with the idea after realizing the everyday need for legal services was coupled with the inability for many to pay the high hourly cost of an experienced attorney. Legal zoom, a private company, came to be held by employees and the people who helped fund it because of obstacles that arose in financing the business in its early stages. The idea and...click here to read the rest.

What is Pfizer?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Pfizer is the largest research-based biological company in the world, with its headquarters in New York and its Research and Development (R&D) Center in Groton, Connecticut. In 1849, Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhardt founded Pfizer in Brooklyn; their first product was an anti-parasitic drug, santonin. This drug was an immediate success and by 1910 the company was the leading fermentation expert. This specific skill was used to mass produce penicillin, the “miracle drug” during World War II; the majority of the penicillin shipped oversees was produced by Pfizer.

Today, Pfizer is run by ...Click here to read the rest.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

What is Visa?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Visa Incorporated is an international corporation based out off San Francisco, California. It is the largest operator of electronic retail payment, managing payments among financial institutions, merchants, consumers businesses, and government entities around the world. Before becoming public in early 2008 it was operated as a cooperative of 21,000 financial institutions. Visa now issues three types of cards: Debit cards (pay from a checking / savings account), Credit cards (pay monthly payments with interest), and Prepaid cards (pay from a cash account that has no check writing privileges).

The birth of Visa is very interesting. Bank of America originally launched a BankAmericard credit card in 1958 which eventually became international through partnerships with other banks. Soon, it grew so big that BankAmericard was given up by Bank of America and formed its own corporation by the name of NBI. This corporation managed the BankAmericard system within the United States, although Bank of America continued to develop the...click here to read the rest.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

What is Hulu?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Hulu is a joint venture firm founded between News Corporation and NBC Universal in March of 2008. Hulu’s underlying philosophy is “Old is Gold” because revenues are made by showing complete episodes of well-known television series. In addition, full-length movies, highly demanded clips from primetime television shows, news stories, and sports games are also offered. These videos are presented on a clean and professional, user-friendly interface. The start-up company, led by CEO Jason Kilar, tries to leverage its competitors such as iTunes and YouTube with a more user friendly interface that is responsive to its target audience. For users, the service is free and ad-supported, with optional registration. In addition to NBC and Fox, Hulu also carries shows from USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci-Fi, Style, Sundance, G4, and Oxygen channels.

Even though Hulu is a service available to anyone, it is geared towards the Generation Y demographic. Generation Y is the 79.8 million person generation, also known as the Millennial, comprising mainly of individuals in their twenties, born between 1977 and 1995. This generation is technologically literate, highly individualistic...Click Here to read the rest.

Monday, January 26, 2009

What is General Electric?-FREE Investment Analysis

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General Electric, more commonly known as GE, is a multinational conglomerate that focuses on technology, media, and financial services. GE began in 1876 with Thomas Alva Edison’s opening of his first experimental factory in New Jersey. After a number of years of experimenting, he established the Edison General Electric Company in 1890. For two years, Edison’s General Electric was in stiff competition with Thomson-Houston Company, a rival electrical innovation company. In 1892, after each company’s patents began to make it impossible to install new technology, the two companies combined to form the General Electric Company.

Since that time, GE has gone through countless acquisitions and restructures to become the incredibly diversified company that it is today. GE is now divided into four separate businesses that focus on individual industries, and while these businesses are separate, they still complement each other. Those divisions are Technology Infrastructure, Energy Infrastructure, GE Capital, and NBC Universal. These four divisions employ...Click Here to read the rest.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

What is TATA Motors?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Tata Motors is a multinational corporation with headquarters in Mumbai, India, led by Ratan Tata, the Chairman. It was founded by Jameshetji Tata and J. Baker when Mercedes-Benz and Tata Motors joined forces to produce the first truck in India. Tata Motors is India’s leading manufacturer of passenger and commercial vehicles. On the global scale, it is the fifth largest medium and heavy commercial vehicle manufacturer and the second largest medium and heavy bus manufacturer. Over 4 million Tata vehicles are on Indian roads today, with the first one manufactured back in 1954. Tata Motors is just one branch of the Tata Group. Tata Motors has manufacturing bases spread all across the country and customers have over 2,000 touch points when dealerships, sales, and service centers are taken into account. It was the first Indian company from the engineering sector to be listed on the NYSE in 2004, and by 2005 it was ranked a top 10 company in India with revenues close to $7.2 Billion. Recently it has had many new economically conservative cars, ....Click Here to read the rest.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

KnowTheCo has launched

Hey guys!
Just wanted you guys to know that KnowTheCo.com has finally launched. There are 11 articles up, but we plan on having 1 new company up each week. For those of you who do not know:

KnowTheCo is a website whose purpose is to analyze companies in such a way that the average individual is educated about the qualitative aspects of a firm and its business model. These free analyses are designed to help investors and curious individuals alike begin the research processes necessary to make intelligent investment decisions for the both the long and short term. This is achieved through careful and in depth research of each company, summarized in articles, to revel the following core aspects: current strengths and competitive advantages, future opportunities, threats, and weaknesses.



These are the following links guys for the articles:
TATA Motors: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=22
GE: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=27
Hulu: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=26
Visa: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=21
Pfizer: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=23
LegalZoom: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=31
GameFly: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=28
Zara: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=20
Infosys: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=25
3M: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=30
Boeing: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=29