I woke up in quite a thick mental fog this morning after Kris & Robyn Jones’ beautiful Pepperwedding. Fortunately my phone rang and Brock Siegel, Pepperjam’s VP of Biz Dev, had just the cure: a few hours on the lake before catching my flight back to Minneapolis. As we cruised around the lake, Brock mentioned that this was the lake he recently completed a 1 mile swim on as part of the Wilkes-Barre triathlon he did with Kris Jones and Mike Jones. Marcus Tandler mentioned that he was quite the swimmer himself. I was pretty sure a challenge had presented itself, and being the gambler that I am I offered $100 to the winner of a swimming race. Marcus protested that he had just taken down half a pizza and some chicken wings, but a little peer pressure was all that was needed to get the ball rolling. The course was specified by me and the race was on. Marcus got a ferocious start, and it wasn’t looking good for Brock. The tide turned though, at the half-way mark when Marcus ran out of steam and Brock’s tenacity came through. And the winner:

Arbitrage this. Arbitrage that. If you’re really cool, you call it “arb”. I’m sick and tired of seeing the word arbitrage every time someone makes a profit. It is especially prevalent and poorly used in the online marketing world. Arbitrage is the practice of buying and selling something when there is a price discrepancy between markets. Buying corn at the farmer’s market and selling it on a street corner is not arbitrage. There are costs involved, and more importantly for the pure definition of arbitrage, there are risks involved. Maybe no one on the corner will buy your corn, then you’re stuck with it. However, IF you were able to sit in front of a computer and notice that corn futures on the west coast exchange are selling for more than corn futures on the east coast, and IF you were able to buy and sell those between the 2 exchanges at basically the exact same moment, THEN you would be doing arbitrage. More examples:

Buying cheap AdWords and getting users to click high-priced AdWords (via AdSense): Arbitrage

Buying Google/Yahoo/MSN PPC traffic and directing to affiliates: Not Fricking Arbitrage (risk, not a direct price difference between markets)

Buying computer parts online online (Sorry, Shoe) and selling them locally: Not Fricking Arbitrage (risk, additional costs, timeframe)

Taking out a loan at 5% on Prosper.com, and then re-lending the same money at 8%: Arbitrage

Buying (and converting to A) Berkshire Hathaway B shares when the price of 30 of them would be less than an A share: Arbitrage

Buying anything and selling it on eBay: Not Arbitrage

I know this post isn’t going to cause some fundamental shift in how people use the word arbitrage, but at least I got it off my chest.

I finally pulled the trigger the other day and ordered a Squeezebox. I’ve had my eye on them for a long time, but for some reason I just never ordered one. Within 5 minutes of receiving it I had it configured and integrated into my network. By far the coolest feature of the Squeezebox though is the ability to stream music from Pandora. If you’ve never heard of Pandora you’re missing out on one of the gems of the Internet. The premise of Pandora is simple but elaborate. You give them a song or an artist you like. Every song in the Pandora “catalog” has been carefully scrutinized by musicians and they’ve created a genome for music. So they take the song you say you like and analyze what characteristics that song has. Then it pulls other music out of the catalog that shares those characteristics. For example my favorite station is one I created based on Atmoshpere (a local Minneapolis hip-hop group). I just clicked play on the station, and it played a song by Jurassic 5. If I click “Why did you play this song”, Pandora says:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features a slow moving bass line, a dry recording sound, thin orchestration and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.

Suffice to say Pandora is badass. The point of this post was the Squeezeox though. This little device is very well done. It is intuitive, easy to use, great looking and sounds fantastic. Especially at the price, $300, I’d say you’re remiss if you’re still playing Mp3s in your house by hooking a laptop up to the stereo. I’m going to order another one for my bedroom.

This video of Jim Cramer going ballistic about the Bear Sterns issue in the market last week is hilarious. This guy knows his stuff, and if you’ve ever seen his show you know how passionate he is. On this segment he goes absolutely off the handle and it’s awesome.

Best quote: “You can’t even get a loan if you’re rich like ME.” That’s aggressive.

I know, it has been weeks since I’ve blogged. We’ve been so busy with the AuctionAds sale I haven’t had time to rant on anything. I’ll see what I can do. If there’s something you’d like to see a blog post on, drop a comment or send me an email. Thanks Shoe for calling me a piker blogger.