Kevin Kwak’s Blog

Hello everyone,

1) For the web publishers out there, have you heard about the Business.com domain sales. In 1999, Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton purchased the domain for a whooping $7.2 million which was the highest price paid for a domain name. Soon enough, they were mocked for paying a ridiculous price.

The laugh was actually the other way around. The same domain has been sold to a telephone-directory company R.H. Donnelley Corp. for $340-360 Million dollars! Talk about an extremely high ROI; 4622~4900% gain on their investment (before tax).
2) I use to work at a property management firm right out of college. The firm managed and invested primarily in Class-A office buildings in the Los Angeles central business district. The company does an excellent job managing and acquiring profitable buildings for long-term investments.

A fascinating thing that has been happening with trophy prized office buildings are the increased number of exchanges and the market price of the property. The cheap debt available from the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) allowed private and institutional investors to acquire properties at a highly leveraged debt. Thus investors were bidding and bidding on the Class-A offices (hottest property type this year), which resulted in incredibly high purchase price and very low yield expectations. Yet the cycle continued and certain properties were being exchanged within a short months at a higher price than the last transactions even when the building had not gone through a value-added work.

Hello everyone,

Have you heard about the “One Laptop Per Child” project that is currently undergoing development? The mission is to deliver these high-tech yet low priced computer notebooks to undeveloped third world countries so that children and young adults can obtain education to advance the lives of their community and eventually their country.

The project’s vision along with other relevant information can be found at http://laptop.org/.

Making a Difference One Child at a Time
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118462081476168003-search.html?KEYWORDS=one+laptop&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month
July 17, 2007; Page B4

The nonprofit group One Laptop Per Child has as self-explanatory a title as can be imagined. It was founded in 2005 and is closely associated with Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the MIT Media Lab.

What are the goals of your group?There are about a billion children in the developing world who don’t have the opportunities they should or could have, and we want to figure out a way to reach them. We think that building an affordable, connected laptop is the way to do it. So we’ve been developing something known as the “Hundred Dollar Laptop,” which is our target price for a few years hence. It’s designed for 6 to 16-year-olds, and has a number of unique features, including a very high resolution sunlight readable display. It runs on two watts of electricity, so it can be powered by solar or by human energy, for kids who live off the grid.

How many are in use right now?
We have about 5,000 machines out in the field now. Our goal is one billion in the developing world. It’s going to take a decade.