Among the thousand of products and services Google Inc.�(NASDAQ: GOOG) offers free to users, it would be hard to imagine a new one, or, at least one which could draw a lot of traffic. But, the search company has come up with a new, original service — the opportunity to check the menus of countless restaurants as a means to decide where to eat.
In a blog post for Google+, engineers wrote recently:
Next time you��e planning a brunch or a date night, check to make sure the menu has something to satisfy everyone in your group, without having to browse through several restaurants��websites. Just search Google to show you the menu for the eatery you��e considering and you can see it right on the top of your search page��omplete with tabs for different parts of the menu (like appetizers, brunch or dinner) and, often, prices��efore you make your reservation. Menus are available in the U.S. only for now. Bon app茅tit!
Google occasionally introduces something which can disrupt an entire industry. The restaurant industry relied on paper menus for decades, and perhaps longer. People had to physically show up� to make decisions. The internet has changed that somewhat. However, many restaurants do not display their entire lists of food and drink. Google means to change that, whether the industry likes it or not.
Top High Dividend Stocks To Own Right Now: Western Copper and Gold Corp (WRN)
Western Copper and Gold Corporation (Western), formerly Western Copper Corporation, is an exploration-stage company. The Company is engaged in the development of the Casino mineral property located in Yukon, Canada. The Casino property contains gold, copper, and molybdenum. The Casino Project is an open-pit mine and concentrator complex located in the Yukon Territory of Canada. The Casino property consists of 705 full and partial active quartz mineral claims. The total area covered is 13,124 hectares. CRS Copper Resources Corp. (CRS), a 100% owned subsidiary of the Company, is the registered owner of all claims. On October 17, 2011, the Company completed a plan of arrangement (the Arrangement) involving the Company and two of its subsidiaries Copper North Mining Corp. (Copper North), and NorthIsle Copper and Gold Inc. (NorthIsle). Pursuant to the Arrangement, it transferred the Carmacks Copper Project and the Redstone Project to Copper North and the Island Copper property. Advisors' Opinion:- [By Hebba Investments]
Therefore the situation is still very bullish for investors in physical gold and the gold ETFs (GLD, CEF, and PHYS). Investors interested in leveraging this situation into higher potential profits may also consider buying gold miners such as Randgold (GOLD), Goldcorp (GG), Yamana Gold (AUY), and any of the other gold miners. Finally, those willing to shoulder much larger risks may consider some of the exploration and micro-cap companies that offer significant profits at a high risk such as Chesapeake Gold (CHPGF.PK), Pretium Resources (PVG), Western Copper (WRN), or any other of the junior exploration companies. Though investors should keep in mind that gold mining companies and explorers do not always rise with a rising gold price - do your research before you invest in the miners.
Best Gas Utility Companies To Buy For 2014: CommonWealth REIT (CWH)
CommonWealth REIT is a real estate investment trust launched and managed by Reit Management & Research LLC. The fund invests in the real estate markets of the United States. It seeks to invest in office buildings, industrial buildings, and leased industrial land. CommonWealth REIT was founded in 1986 and is domiciled in United States.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Chris DeMuth Jr.]
So you do not have to wait, here's the punch line…
The recent 2Q 2013 earnings announcement validated the belief that management continues to lay out exactly what they are going to do and then effectively execute on those plans.The current stock price of roughly $4.00 offers a discount to the intrinsic value of the company, which I model to be about $4.80 today, with the potential to be worth between $7.50 and $9.00 per share after cash deployment and the issuance of $100M of new equity capital.The incentive structure for the Gramercy management is very tightly aligned to the common shareholders in contrast to some other REITs, such as CommonWealth REIT (CWH), which is the current poster child for non-alignment.The REIT structure forces management to return cash to shareholders and not hold it to spend on growth projects. Growth capital must be justified to common shareholders every time it is requested.The REIT Legal Requirements Favor Common Shareholders over Company Management
Best Gas Utility Companies To Buy For 2014: Diamond Foods Inc.(DMND)
Diamond Foods, Inc., a packaged food company, engages in processing, marketing, and distributing snack products, as well as culinary, in-shell, and ingredient nuts. Its snack products include glazed nuts, roasted and mixed nuts, breakfast trail mix products, microwave popcorn products, and potato and tortilla chips. The company?s culinary nuts comprise shelled nuts, pegboard nuts, and harvest reserve premium nuts. Its in-shell nuts consist of uncracked nuts and mixed nuts; and ingredient/food service products include shelled and processed nuts, and custom-processed nuts. The company offers its products under the Emerald, Pop Secret, Kettle, and Diamond of California brand names. It markets its culinary nuts to individuals, who prepare meals or baked goods at home; and ingredient and food service nuts to food processors, restaurants, bakeries, and food service companies and their suppliers. Diamond Foods, Inc. sells its products directly to retailers, such as national groce ry stores, club stores, mass merchandisers, and drug store chains; and indirectly through wholesale distributors, who serve independent and small regional retail grocery store chains and convenience stores. The company offers its products in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, and Japan. Diamond Foods, Inc. was founded in 1912 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Jacob Meredith]
Diamond Foods (NASDAQ: DMND ) has an�extremely high debt load and has recently�been�accused of accounting fraud. This may not be an investment for the faint of heart, but if you believe in second chances then�this company could reward you handsomely.
- [By Laura Brodbeck]
Thursday
Earnings Expected From: UTi Worldwide Inc. (NASDAQ: UTIW), Renesola Ltd. (NYSE: SOL), Royal Bank of Canada (NYSE: RY), Kroger Company (NYSE: KR), Dollar General Corporation (NYSE: DG), Diamond Foods, Inc. (NASDAQ: DMND) Economic Releases Expected: US factory orders, French unemployment rate, Bank of England interest rate decision, US GDPFriday
- [By Eric Volkman]
A new individual is heading the finance team at Diamond Foods (NASDAQ: DMND ) . The company has appointed Raymond Silcock as its chief financial officer. He replaces interim CFO Michael Murphy, who has been in the position since early February. Silcock will also serve as executive vice president. The appointment is effective as of June 11.
- [By Rick Munarriz]
We can start with Diamond Foods (NASDAQ: DMND ) .�Analysts were expecting the snack distributor to post a steep loss of $0.17 a share. Diamond surprised the pros by generating an actual profit of $0.05 a share.
Best Gas Utility Companies To Buy For 2014: Fair Isaac Corp (FICO)
Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), incorporated on May 15, 1987, provides products and services that enable businesses to automate, improve and connect decisions to enhance business performance. The Company operates in three segments: Applications, which include pre-configured Decision Management applications designed for a specific type of business problem or process; Scores, which includes the Company's business-to-business scoring solutions and services, its myFICO solutions for consumers, and associated professional services, and Tools segment, which include software tools that clients can use to create their own custom Decision Management applications, as well as associated professional services. In May 2012, the Company acquired Entiera Inc. In September 2012, it acquired Adeptra Ltd. On April 1, 2013, FICO acquired Infoglide Software Corp.
Applications
The Company develops industry-tailored Decision Management applications, categorized as Applications, which apply analytics, data management and Decision Management software to specific business challenges and processes. These include credit offer prescreening, insurance claims management and others. The Company's Applications primarily serve clients in the banking, insurance, healthcare, and retail sectors. The chief offerings for marketing are the Company's FICO Analytic Offer Manager and FICO Customer Dialogue Manager. These solutions offer a suite of products, capabilities and services designed to integrate the technology and analytic services needed to perform context-sensitive customer acquisition, cross-selling and retention programs and deliver mathematically optimized offers.
The Company provides solutions that enable banks, credit unions, finance companies, installment lenders and other companies to automates and improve the processing of requests for credit or service. The Company provides customer management solutions for banking, where it�� account and customer management product is the FICO TRIAD! Customer Manager. The Company markets and sells TRIAD end-user software licenses, maintenance, consulting services, and strategy designs and evaluation. The Company's fraud management products improve the Company's clients' profitability by predicting the likelihood that a given transaction or customer account is experiencing fraud.
The Company's solutions are designed to detect and prevent a range of fraud and risk types across multiple industries, including credit and debit payment card fraud; e-payment fraud; deposit account fraud; technical fraud and bad debt; healthcare fraud; Medicaid and Medicare fraud, and property and casualty insurance claims fraud, including workers' compensation fraud. FICO fraud solutions protect financial institutions, insurance companies and government agencies from losses and damaged customer relationships caused by fraud and related criminal behavior.
FICO Fraud Predictor with Merchant Profiles is used in conjunction with Falcon Fraud Manager on payment card monitoring for credit and debit to improve fraud detection rates through the inclusion of merchant profiles. In addition to the Falcon products, the Company offers FICO Card Alert Service. Card Alert Service is a solution for fighting ATM debit fraud. The Card Alert Service identifies counterfeit payment cards and reports them to issuers. The Company offers FICO Economic Impact Service, which uses time series modeling of the macro economy to allow lenders to forecast future credit risk performance based on their views of the economy. Adeptra's software as a service (SaaS) platform enables financial services institutions and other businesses to take advantage of the explosion in mobile communication in order to manage risk, fight fraud and improve the customer experience, all in real time.
The Company competes with Acxiom, Epsilon, Equifax, Experian, Harte-Hanks, InfoUSA, KnowledgeBase, Merkle, TargetBase, CGI, NICE Systems, BAE, SAS, ACI Worldwide, Emdeon, Ingenix, ViPS, MedSt! at, Veris! k Analytics and IBM.
Scores
The Company develops credit scores based on third-party data. The Company's FICO Scores are used in most United States credit decisions, by the banks and credit card organizations, as well as by mortgage and auto loan originators. These scores provide a consistent and objective measure of an individual's credit risk. Credit grantors use the FICO Scores to prescreen candidates for solicitation, to evaluate applicants for new credit and to review existing accounts. The FICO Scores are calculated based on scoring models and implemented on third-party data. The version of the FICO Score for United States and Canadian lenders is the FICO 8 Score. The Company's other solutions include The FICO Credit Capacity Index and The FICO Economic Impact Index.
The Company competes with Experian and Experian-Scorex (U.S. partner), TransUnion and TransUnion International, Equifax, VantageScore, CRIF, LexisNexis and ChoicePoint.
Tools
The Company provides software products that businesses use to build their own tailored Decision Management applications. In contrast to its packaged Applications developed for specific industry applications, the Company�� Tools support the addition of Decision Management capabilities to virtually any application or operational system. These tools are sold as licensed software, and can be used by themselves or together to advance a client�� Decision Management initiatives. The Company uses these tools as common software components for its own Decision Management applications. The principal products offered are software tools include Rules Management, Predictive Modeling and Optimization.
The Company competes with IBM, SAS, Pegasystems and Angoss.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Rich Smith]
Alamy You've probably heard by now that in some vague way, your credit rating has something to do with the premiums your auto insurance company charges you for coverage. But if you're like me, you've probably never quite understood the details of how this work. Fortunately, the good folks at InsuranceQuotes.com -- a subsidiary of Bankrate (RATE) -- recently published a report that draws back the curtain on this little-understood quirk of the insurance industry. Blame it on FICO Used to be, the rate you paid for insuring your car was tied primarily to demographic and personal factors that were clearly connected to the risk that you'd damage your car and ask the insurance company to pay for it: things like your age, sex, marital status, and driving history. It won't surprise anyone that younger, unmarried men are more likely to be risky drivers than soccer moms, and should therefore pay higher premiums. But about 20 years ago, the folks at Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) found a correlation between low credit scores and a higher risk of filing an insurance claim. That's not causation, of course -- having bad credit doesn't somehow cause you to crash your car. But according to FICO, "people who choose to effectively manage their finances are also less likely to have future insurance losses." Conversely, there is a "statistical correlation between a person's credit score and the likelihood that he or she will file an auto insurance claim in the future." Suddenly, FICO had a new way to hawk its credit histories to insurance companies -- and insurance companies had a new excuse to raise your rates. News Flash: Everybody Does It Ever since, insurance companies have used this finding to tweak the rates they charge you for insurance. Today, says InsuranceQuotes, "about 97 percent of U.S. insurance companies" do it. But how do they do it, exactly?
- [By Dan Caplinger]
What we do know
Credit-reporting agencies aren't entirely opaque about what goes into their credit score calculations. For instance, Fair Isaac (NYSE: FICO ) , the company behind the popular FICO score, offers a detailed explanation of what goes into every person's score. A strong payment history without delinquencies or late payments carries the most weight, making up 35% of the FICO score, while 30% comes from how the amounts you owe compare to the total credit you have available to you. Smaller percentages of the score come from other areas, including the length of your credit history, the amount of new credit you've taken out recently, and how wide a mix of different types of credit you have outstanding. - [By Seth Jayson]
Calling all cash flows
When you are trying to buy the market's best stocks, it's worth checking up on your companies' free cash flow once a quarter or so, to see whether it bears any relationship to the net income in the headlines. That's what we do with this series. Today, we're checking in on Fair Isaac (NYSE: FICO ) , whose recent revenue and earnings are plotted below. - [By Dan Caplinger]
A recent study from Fair Isaac's (NYSE: FICO ) FICO took a look at the demographics of credit card use lately. What they found is that outstanding credit card debt among 18- to 29-year-olds dropped from just over $3,000 in late 2007 to a bit over $2,000 last October. That move comes as part of a broader reduction in overall indebtedness, with drops in outstanding mortgage, auto, and most other debt more than offsetting a substantial rise in student-loan debt. Even more surprisingly, the proportion of young adults going without credit cards entirely has risen to nearly one in six, almost double the level from late 2005.
Best Gas Utility Companies To Buy For 2014: FireEye Inc (FEYE)
FireEye, Inc., incorporated on February 18, 2004, invented a purpose-built, virtual machine-based security platform that provides real-time protection to enterprises and governments worldwide against the next generation of cyber attacks. Its technology approach represents a paradigm shift from how information technology (IT) security has been conducted since the earliest days of the information technology industry. The FireEye platform provides real-time, dynamic threat protection without the use of signatures to protect an organization across the primary threat vectors, including Web, email, and files and across the different stages of an attack life cycle. The core of its purpose-built, virtual machine-based security platform is its virtual execution (MVX), engine, which identifies and protects against known and unknown threats that existing signature-based technologies are unable to detect. The new generation of cyber attacks on organizations, including large and small enterprises and governments worldwide, is characterized by an unprecedented escalation in the complexity and scale of advanced malware created by criminal organizations and nation-states. In January 2014, FireEye, Inc. announced that it had acquired Mandiant.
The Company provides a comprehensive platform that employs a virtualized execution engine and a cloud-based threat intelligence network that uniquely protects organizations from next-generation threats at all stages of the attack lifecycle and across all primary threat vectors, including Web, email and file systems. Its platform is delivered through a family of software-based appliances and includes its DTI cloud subscription as well as support and maintenance services. Its technology platform, built on its MVX engine, is able to identify and protect against known and unknown threats without relying on existing signature-based technologies employed by legacy IT security vendors and best-of-breed point solution vendors. FireEye has over 1,000 customers across more t! han 40 countries, including over one-third of the Fortune 100.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Tess Stynes var popups = dojo.query(".socialByline .popC"); popups.forEach(fu]
FireEye Inc.(FEYE), which offers a virtual machine-based security platform against cyber attacks, announced a weaker-than-expected outlook for the current quarter and year. Shares fell 15% to $31.70 premarket.
- [By Jayson Derrick]
Analysts at Citigroup initiated coverage of FireEye (NASDAQ: FEYE) with a Neutral rating and $60 price target. Shares lost 8.20 percent, closing at $50.36.
- [By Reuters]
Peter Parks, AFP/Getty ImagesThe 12-story building in Shanghai's northern suburb of Gaoqiao where a Chinese military-led hacking group allegedly conducted a series of attacks on U.S. companies networks. BOSTON -- Cybersecurity company FireEye has acquired Mandiant, the computer forensics specialist best known for unveiling a secretive Chinese military unit believed to be behind a series of hacking attacks on U.S. companies. FirEye (FEYE) shares jumped more than 20 percent after Thursday's announcement of the $1.05 billion cash-and-stock deal, which FireEye said closed Monday. It unites two companies with relatively new technologies for thwarting cyber attacks, and brings together two of the most-respected executives in the security industry: FireEye CEO Dave DeWalt and Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia. While sales of older anti-virus products have been on the decline, security experts expect strong growth in both FireEye's cloud-based systems for detecting malicious software and Mandiant's software that analyzes cyber attacks. About a year ago the two companies entered into a technology development agreement that made it easier to deploy their products together. With the merger, FireEye will gain Mandiant's team of forensics investigators. "They have these very strong Navy 'cyber' Seals who respond to breaches and are very good at what they do," DeWalt said about Mandiant. He had previously served as chairman of Mandiant's board. "My aim is to create the strongest security company in the world," DeWalt said in an interview. FireEye, which has yet to post a profit, said the acquisition will be immediately accretive to earnings and expects the combined company's revenue to grow about 50 percent this year. In comparison, Symantec (SYMC), the biggest maker of anti-virus software, has said it expects fiscal 2014 revenue to drop 3 percent to 4 percent. Mandiant is best known for its forensics services. The company rose to prominence in February 2013 when it pu
Best Gas Utility Companies To Buy For 2014: Westwood Holdings Group Inc(WHG)
Westwood Holdings Group, Inc. manages investment assets and provides services for its clients. It operates through two subsidiaries, Westwood Management Corp. and Westwood Trust. The Westwood Management Corp. provides investment advisory services to corporate retirement plans, public retirement plans, endowments and foundations, mutual funds, individuals, and clients of Westwood Trust. The Westwood Trust provides trust and custodial services to institutions and high net worth individuals, and participates in common trust funds that it sponsors. The company was founded in 1983 and is based in Dallas, Texas.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By E.S. Browning]
��t is a slow, grinding process. It is going to take some getting-used-to,��said Mark Freeman, chief investment officer at Westwood Holdings Group Inc.(WHG), which oversees $19 billion in Dallas. It is possible that ��his is what we will be doing over the next several quarters,��he added.
- [By Matt Jarzemsky var popups = dojo.query(".socialByline .popC"); popups.forEach]
Producers focused on hot shale regions have been in vogue among investors of late, said Bill Costello, portfolio manager at Westwood Holdings Group Inc.(WHG), which manages about $19 billion.
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