Gizmodo: wall street

DIY Stock Ticker Pumpkin is Truly Horrifying

Sean Fallon — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:30:00 EDT

A clever cutout may suffice to scare the kids, but if you want your pumpkin to scare adults, consider putting down the carving set and picking up a soldering iron and a couple of 5x7 LED matrix arrays. Why? Because this tiny pumpkin displays the most frightening face of them all—the twisted horror of a 401K plan hemorrhaging funds. My guess is that if you have the know-how, this amusing concept could be scaled up fairly easily for maximum impact. Hit the link for instructions on how to build your own version. [Evil Mad Scientist via DVICE]

12 Gadgety Trading Floors: Just in Time for Today's Wall Street Crisis

Sean Fallon — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:20:00 EDT

As I'm sure you already know, the Dow dropped 500 points today on the news of a Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing and a $50 billion stock buyout of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America Corp. This tag team of devastation sent stocks spiraling down in the worst tumble we have seen since the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, OObject couldn't have picked a better time to drop their list of 12 gadgety trading floors and equipment. My favorite is hedge fund manager Adam Sender's 20-monitor setup. I bet every damn one of them is flashing some sort of big red warning right about now. [OObject]

Motorola Chops Off Handset Division

Wilson Rothman — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:35:12 EDT

Today Motorola said it would chew off its woefully underperforming Mobile Devices group in order to safeguard its healthier businesses—namely Broadband & Mobility Solutions, which includes network equipment, walkie-talkies and business products. This comes after famous Wall Street curmudgeon Carl Icahn laid seige to the mismanaged company. Assuming the deal passes the usual legal and regulatory hurdles, shareholders will get shares of both companies, probably some time in 2009. Handset customers will presumably get nothing, at least in the short term: this doesn't seem like a vote of confidence for Motorola phones. [Reuters]

Washington, D.C., Wall St. Brought to Their Knees by CrackBerry Outage

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:50:14 EDT

While we reported on the BlackBerry service outage (and subsequent magical restoration) earlier, what we didn't note was that it apparently threw Washington, D.C. into sheer chaos. Reuters was on the ground: "I felt like my left arm had been amputated," said Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois. It was, in a word, "crippling."

New York suffered similar end-of-the-world-like disbelief, as "one Wall Street analyst said she kept hitting her BlackBerry's version of a 'refresh' button, not believing that the system could fail." Also in New York, Charles Ross, a criminal defense lawyer, was left feeling "vulnerable and uncomfortable."

Yes, that's how we're strangely feeling right now: vulnerable and uncomfortable. – Matt Buchanan

BlackBerry e-mail outage upsets White House, Wall St [Reuters/Yahoo!]

Apple Rumor: 16GB Flash Based Video iPod

blongo3 — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 20:22:59 EST

Wallstreet analyst, Daniel Amir, is claiming that Apple has a new flash based iPod in the works. This will not be "the" video iPod, but will at least be able to play video, a la the 5G.

Maybe it'll be midsized between the full and the Nano. – Brian Lam

Apple's iPod roadmap said to list three new models for '07 [RegHardware]

IPC IQ/MAX: Trader's Friend

johnb — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:25:38 EST

This thing is a big fancy phone for Wall Street traders designed by Frog Design. It has all kinds of crap all over it, as we can see here, but most interestingly is a quote by IPC's CEO, Lance Boxer:

The trading floor is one of the most high-octane and high stakes environments in business. With the advent of cell phones, iPods and Xboxes, the new generation of traders has been weaned on consumer technology.

There you have it. Industrial design for the ADD set. This phone has a TFT screen and DeskShare, which lets traders fob calls off to their co-workers when they go outside to snarf down a burger and five cigarettes.

Product Page [IPC]