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The Fascinating Difference Between How Rich People And Poor People Play The Lottery

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rich-people-and-poor-people-play-the-lottery-2012-3

Does it seem like this massive Mega-Millions jackpot is attracting a lot of Lottery players that you wouldn’t normally expect?

It’s not an accident.

In a 2002 Senior Honors Thesis at Harvard titled: Dreaming Big: Why Do People Play the Powerball?, Emily Oster produced these two great charts.

The first looks at per-capita sales of lottery tickets in poor neighborhoods. Each dot represents one drawing.

The second look at the same jackpots, but instead focuses on per-capita sales in rich neighborhoods.

The difference?

It is clear from these graphs that the poorest zip codes purchase more tickets at the lowest jackpot levels. However, at the highest jackpots the sales are about the same (slightly over $16 per capita in the poorest zip codes and around $17 per capita in the richest).

Basically, the poor play all the lotteries. The rich just go for the big ones, but when the big ones happen, they do it at the same level as the poor.

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From Reuters Scotty Barber, one of the only possible Apple charts you can make that doesn’t go up.

It’s a look at the company’s PE ratio vs. that of the S&P 500.

Note that this is the “forward PE”, so at the moment it’s based on estimated earnings, but the gist would be the same even if you used trailing PE.

Of course, this chart makes Apple investors pull their hair out, since the ‘E’ has been growing so fast, they don’t understand why it’s converged with the general market like this. In theory, fast growing earnings should cause higher multiples.

On the other hand, as fast as it’s growing, we don’t think there are too many companies out there that have reversed such a big secular trend of PE compression.

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SendGrid has sent 30 billion e-mails in the three years it’s been in business — and none of them are spam.

SendGrid is an e-mail cloud service hired by Pinterest, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Spotify, job sites, daily deal sites and many other companies.

About 40,000 Web applications use SendGrid, says its CEO  — and Boulder startup icon — Jim Franklin. And none of it is spam because users sign up these e-mails, such as job openings, friend requests and the like.

Franklin says it even coaches its customers on how to do e-mail so people don’t report it as spam.

“One person sending e-mail to another is easy. But an app sending out e-mail is hard. E-mail is a problem for developers,” explains Franklin.

So it’s no surprise that SendGrid is growing at 10% annually — it now sends out more than 3 billion emails per month – and it recently landed Microsoft Azure as a partner. SendGrid will now be the default e-mail service for any app using Microsoft’s cloud, Franklin says. New Azure developers qualify for 25,000 free e-mails a month.

The company is one of the shining stars of the blossoming Boulder startup scene. It began in Boulder’s TechStars accelerator program in 2009 and has boomed from there. It recently landed raised $21 million in Series B funding in January — for a total of $27 million raised so far

As SendGrid uses Rackspace, Web apps that also use Rackspace qualify for 40,000 free e-mails per month.

All who know SendGrid are expecting an IPO in as little three years. One of its VCs, Bessemer Venture Partners, has done over 100 IPOs, notes Franklin. That’s if the company doesn’t accept an acquisition offer before then, says Franklin. 

And if you’re interested in one of the 30 job openings at the company, you might also want to know that the company motto is the 4H’s: Honest, hungry, humble, happy.

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Data is starting to trickle in and shape our understanding of the nascent mobile ad market. According to data from Flurry Analytics, 25- to 34-year-old females are the most valuable demographic for advertisers and publishers (as measured by the underlying click-through and conversion rates).

This is not surprising: Young people have adopted smartphones at a much higher rate than their parents. However, mobile CPMs will eventually even out as penetration picks up amongst older age groups. Furthermore, women should be more valuable because they historically have controlled household expenses and there is some evidence that they use smartphones more than men while shopping.

Finally, the eCPMs strike us as pretty high—even as smartphone usage has exploded, demand seems to have held up.

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• Smartphone Sales Will Reach Nearly 1.6 Billion Units By 2016
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