聊一聊管理层的管理能力和眼光，举个例子。

投资人

这是一个管理层有大智慧的例子： GOOGLE 买了 SKYBOX（微卫星应用公司，提供连续的成本的实时高分辨率卫星图像业务）。这项决定会在未来的商业，生活的影响巨大。给GOOGLE的营收带来巨大的增长点。

举个在金融领域的实例：
1。通过分析富士康工厂 货车进出。推算APPLCE iPHONE 的出货时间和数量。
2。通过分析沙特储油窖，推算真实的石油产量和储量。估算石油价格。
3。通过分析 WALMART，TARGET， Chipotle Mexican Grill 等零售商停车场的车辆，来推算业务情况。股票抛或买，不必等到下个季度的财报。
4。通过分析玉米地的涨势，来估算粮食的涨势情况。期货提前布局。
。。。。。。。


（这是个“旧闻”，但不影响其力道，真正的价值投资的新闻不在这几天延误， 时间的沉淀更能让新闻展现其价值和影响。）


Google 今后的 ER 想不好都不行。如何操作，你懂的。 （此股票我已经有推荐过两次，今天是炒冷饭，只是拿GOOGLE 举例）



Amid Stratospheric Valuations, Google Unearths a Deal With Skybox
For a Mere $500 Million, Satellite Firm Promises to Boost Earnings and Rattle the World


June 15, 2014 4:40 p.m. ET

For $500 million, Google is getting a lot with satellite firm Skybox Imaging. Above, a SkySat-1 Clean Room. Skybox Imaging

Silicon Valley lately has seemed like the land of wild—or at least puzzling—valuations.

Facebook  FB -1.84%     bought WhatsApp, a messaging service with paltry revenue and at least a half-dozen sophisticated competitors, for $19 billion. Uber was just valued at $18.2 billion in a round of private-equity financing. Even Beats Electronics, a company with a music service in its infancy and technologically inferior headphones that could fall out of fashion at any moment, was valued at $3.2 billion to Apple.

But  Google  GOOGL +0.65%     just bought a company that could have a bigger impact on its bottom line and on the world than any other recent acquisition by the search giant or its tech brethren—for just $500 million.

For 1/38th the price of WhatsApp, Google acquired Skybox Imaging, which puts satellites into orbit 185 miles above Earth on the tip of the same Russian missiles that once threatened the U.S. with nuclear destruction. And here's what Skybox could allow Google to accomplish: Within a couple of years, when you want to know whether you left your porch light on or if your teenager borrowed the car you forbade her to drive, you might check Google Maps.

That's because by 2016 or so, Skybox will be able to take images of anyplace on earth Earth twice a day—all with just a half-dozen satellites. By the time its entire fleet of 24 satellites has launched in 2018, Skybox will be imaging the entire Earth at a resolution sufficient to capture, for example, real-time video of cars driving down the highway. And it will be doing it three times a day.

You might think, thanks to weather maps and the satellite view on Google Maps, that such imagery already is readily available. But because satellites were, until recently, so expensive to build and launch, that isn't the case. There are only nine satellites in orbit now that capture high resolution images for the commercial market, and their capabilities are regularly commandeered for national-security purposes by the U.S. government. That means most of the pictures of the Earth that you've seen are of poor quality and years out of date.

Skybox's headquarters. Google bought the company for $500 million. EPA

And yet, as I discovered when I visited Skybox recently at its modest, low-slung headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., satellite imagery isn't even the business in which the company's founders see themselves. As at Google, the business of Skybox isn't data, but knowledge.

"We think we are going to fundamentally change humanity's understanding of the economic landscape on a daily basis," says co-founder Dan Berkenstock.

Here's an example of what he's talking about. In 2010, an analyst at UBS discovered that if he bought satellite images of parking lots of Wal-Mart stores, he could predict the company's sales figures before they were revealed in its quarterly earnings report, because cars in lots equal shoppers in stores.

"We're looking at Foxconn every week," Mr. Berkenstock says, because measuring the density of trucks outside the Taiwanese company's manufacturing facilities tells Skybox when the next iPhone will be released.

Skybox can determine how much oil is being pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia by imaging oil-storage tanks from above. The company can peg the likely price of grain months in advance by measuring the health of every square yard of cropland on Earth. One city has used satellite data from another company to determine who built illegal backyard pools and might also use it to identify water-restriction violators during a drought.

It's competitive intelligence as spy craft. And it's compelling enough that a Skybox employee once told a reporter for Wired that the company might someday simply become an unreasonably profitable hedge fund.

Yet these known uses of satellite data—which have never been available in the abundance that Skybox says it can achieve—are just the beginning. It's the unpredictable applications that could be the biggest. Like GPS before it, which started out as a military-only system that required laptop-size receivers and now enables driving directions in every smartphone, Skybox's images will inevitably lead to apps and services no one can envision—with unknowable disruptive potential.

Skybox executives tell me they hope to offer their data to outside developers. This could lead to a constellation of new services for businesses. This is the kind of competitive intelligence that simply hasn't existed before, so it's difficult to put a price on it. But the ability to spy on competitors or monitor your supplier's supplier's suppliers could be tremendously useful.

If Google can get a cut of those services by charging a licensing fee for the underlying data, it could be a new business that might move the needle on Google's revenue mix, which, ample as it is, remains stubbornly linked to search advertising.

In the short term, Google has said it would use Skybox's images to improve the search company's maps. A patent revealed in May indicates that Google builds its superaccurate maps directly from satellite imagery, and the company has long had a deal with Skybox competitor  DigitalGlobe,  DGI -0.05%     whose satellites cost 10 times as much as Skybox's and are 10 times heavier, leading to much higher launch costs. DigitalGlobe's stock dipped 4% on news of the Skybox deal.

A potential downside to the Skybox acquisition is that it could represent a new level of privacy invasion for everyday people. Google will be able to determine all sorts of things about us that might not have been discernible before. For example, is your home on a block with lots of trees? It turns out that correlates with household income. Or, how many cars do you own?

Google's satellites won't be powerful enough to pick out individual people. Yet since Skybox's satellites get their visual acuity not from their optics—which are relatively primitive—but clever software, it's possible they'll become ever more keen-eyed even after they launch.

In a few years, when we look up at the sky, we'll have to wonder: Am I being watched right now?


http://online.wsj.com/articles/a ... h-skybox-1402864823

cat_lady

先顶再读！

NG_NM

谢谢

xiaochong

google

这不就间谍卫星吗？

Jeff

thanks!

acoust

投资人

google 发表于 2014-6-19 04:15 PM
这不就间谍卫星吗？

这是标志着微卫星时代的到来。关键是：经济性，这是与军事间谍分析的本质区别。
这可以使得卫星实时超高分辨率的信息可以走进我们的经济和生活。
举个例子：MIT 就开发出一个算法。可以通过分析中国发电厂冒烟情况，计算中国的能源产出，进而估计出 那个国家的GDP和经济成长情况。未来是REALTIME 的时代。类似这种太空信息的利用，对未来商业的影响是很大的。自动电动车，智慧能源网，智慧物联网。。。这样可以把INTERNET 维度延伸。推动各行的产业升级。

GOOGLE 够狠吧。间谍（军事和商业）领域的数据分析可是个超级蛋糕。

zjbjf

怎样变成利润？

sfbayarea

当年的 nvt 就有这样的计划， 可惜被 nok 收狗后， 就没了那回事。