Busy, Busy Weekend Coming Up

The February hearing dockets should be released tomorrow which is one of the highlights of every month for me.

Mondays are also a huge highlight, when generally, when wells from three days come off the confidential list. If Monday is a holiday, Tuesday is the big day of the week.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

CVX will report 4Q13 earnings tomorrow. By the way, from Reuters:

Oil producer ConocoPhillips outshone larger competitors on Thursday with a quarterly profit that beat expectations as it moved to overcome the problems of high costs and lack of fresh reserves that have nagged at Exxon Mobil Corp and Royal Dutch Shell.

ConocoPhillips, the largest U.S. oil company without refining operations, said its profits were helped by the sale of its Algerian business and by higher crude oil production in North America.

The company shed its refining business in 2012 and has sold billions of dollars of lower-yielding assets to focus on more profitable oil production from North American shale basins such as the Eagle Ford in south Texas.

Analysts said Conoco's plan is beginning to pay off at a time when the industry faces pressure from shareholders to lift returns despite flat oil prices and rising costs for risky exploration work designed to replace reserves.

By the way, COP is the company Warren took a big bite of some years ago, for which he apologized, and pundits have taken him to task. He should have stuck to his guns and not changed his investing style. Whatever. 

COP has a huge presence in the Bakken through its wholly-owned subsidiary, which Reuters failed to mention, at least in that part of the story I actually read.

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Apple

This is another incredible story.


Steve Jobs always talked about skating to where the puck is going to be, quote #50.

I have gotten tired of all the talk about iTV, iWatch, and how all the pundits suggest that Apple cannot innovate without Steve Jobs. Someone said, maybe it was Mr Jobs himself who said, that he left enough ideas behind to keep the company busy for a hundred years, or at least as long as the Bakken produced oil (okay, he didn't say that part about the Bakken. I made that part up. But he said that other thing).

Now a fact, not a rumor, from MacRumors:

Next week, Major League Baseball will begin rolling out thousands of iBeacons in ballparks around the country according to a source familiar with the plans who shared them with MacRumors.

The league is looking to have twenty parks outfitted with roughly 100 iBeacons each by Opening Day at the end of March. Boston, Milwaukee, San Diego, LA Dodgers, and San Francisco are among the teams that will have iBeacons installed.

The iBeacon deployment is one of the largest rollouts in the world, aside from Apple Retail's 254-store effort. MLB will be using iBeacons sourced from Qualcomm.

The iBeacons will work with primarily with MLB's At The Ballpark app, demonstrated at Citi Field last fall. The app should be updated by Opening Day with iBeacon support.

Functionality will vary by ballpark, with individual teams having significant input and control over what users will see. There are a number of potential use cases including point of interest information, concessions, loyalty and rewards programs, shopping, and more. Specific scenarios have yet to be determined for each ballpark and teams will share more information as it gets closer to Opening Day.

Separately, the NFL is rolling out a limited number of iBeacons at MetLife Stadium, the Super Bowl venue for this year, and in Times Square. The beacons will mostly be used to help users get to entry gates and to find Super Bowl-related tourist attractions in the area.

I can imagine Steve Jobs response when anyone brought up "near field communication."

Jobs: "So how far does NFC reach?"
Techhie: "About two inches."
Jobs: "WTF? Two inches? What can you do with just two inches? Come back when you have NFC out to a hundred yards. Then I'll listen. And we'll call it iBeacon.

This is a big deal. iBeacon capability was quietly slipped into all new iPhones. No one else has it.