Next: The Future Just Happened

Rating:
Summary: Next the future just happend
Review: :
The book shows how ones life can be affected by the Stock Market. Jonathan Lebed is 14-year-old boy who is accused of Stock Market fraud. Lewis shows Jonathan in a family setting just to depict the stress the stock market could cause on a small town family. One of the main point that Lewis is showing in presented when he writes, "the point is even a fourteen-year-old boy could see how it worked-why some guy working for free out of a basement in Jackson, Missouri was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall street"(pg.57). The problem was not that Jonathan did what he did but that fact that he was so young an inexperienced.
By reading this book it further my knowledge on how misleading the Stock Market could be when I agree to invest my income I will be more cautious.

Rating:
Summary: A revolution in the market
Review: Every little part of the United States is somehow effected with the Internet. All the businesses in the United states doesn't matter big or small is effected by the Internet. Through his amazing book, Michael Lewis tries to illustrate the importance of Internet in today's business life. He tells the story of a 15-year-old boy called Jonathan Lebed who earns $800,000 dollars over a short period of time. After Jonathan succeeds in earning a small amount of money by buying the stock of a company, he becomes more confidence and steps into the complicated world of the stock Market. As Michael Lewis says, no one found out what Lebed exactly did, but not willing to give up, Lewis continues his investigations and finally finds an answer for this question: Jonathan posts this message two hundred separate times, "The Most Undervalued Stock Ever". In his messages he talks about the situation of FTEC. He says that, currently, FTEC trades for just $2.5, and he continues by saying that he expects to see FTEC at $20 dollars very soon because of some issues that are going on in the company. Then he offers them some FTEC stocks for a very little amount of money. Well, his reasons were logical and acceptable to many people and amazingly, many people believed him. His words were so powerful that they encouraged many people to simply buy huge amounts of stocks from him for way more than what they actually costed . Those poor people, did not know that the sender of these messages was only a 15-year-old boy. So, by doing the same thing on different companies, Jonathan earns $800,000. Through this story, Lewis, tries to explain how Internet has become very important, and that how businesses are so depended on it. When someone communicates with someone else through the Internet, there is no way for him to identify his identity. He proves that it is the Internet, that leads the business in the United States. Everything is so depended on the Internet that a simple change in this huge Network, effects everything in the United States. Through his interesting book, Lewis shows how this new technology has effected the United States and the world remarkably.
I am very proud of Michael Lewis for his great work that reveals many interesting facts about the future of the world being greatly effected by the Internet.

But of course, in my opinion there is something about the book that made it less than perfect. All the definitions and the explanations are so complicated that it took me several minutes to understand them completely.
But overall "Next" is a great book to read.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but fails to bring good connection
Review: In "Next: The future just happened," Michael Lewis opens by stating that in the long run the Internet will become invisible and ubiquituous and no one will think of the social effects anymore than they think of the social effects of electricity. This is a rather obvious statement if one thinks about it: the reason that electricity has had zero social effect on me is because it has been a part of every facet of my life for my entire life. This is the idea that Lewis sets out to explore through stories that he has investigated. The stories are quite interesting, but are not interestng enough to make this book worth the read.

The first chapter, entitled "The Financial Revolt," tells the fascinating story of Jonathan Lebed in great detail. The story stretches for the entire eighty-page chapter and relays the inside scoop on the 15-year old kid that made $800,000 by going into chat rooms and giving financial advice. Lewis's analysis of the Lebed story is that stock prices respond to the public's perspective. Lewis also hints at what might be the future of the stock market: millions of small investors plugging becoming in essence professional analysts, generating little explosions of unreality in every corner of the capital markets. But Lewis fails to further explore this idea, providing many pages of story, but no bang to back it up.

The book follows the pattern of the first chapter: a long, very detailed, interesting story with very little analysis. But the book is only four chapters, so really you're only getting four stories. Marcus Arnold and his rise in legal advice on AskMe.com is discussed in chapter two, Lewis's point being that if one reduces the law to information then anyone can supply it. Sounds like Will Hunting's claim that anyone can get an education with a library card and $1.35 in late fees. In chapter three, kid-whiz Daniel Sheldon and file sharing application Gnutella are explored. Lewis's major point through these three stories and chapters is that the Internet undermined all the old sources of insider power: control of distribution channels, intellectual property, and information. Chapter 4 is about the effect of TiVo and Knowledge Networks on opinion surveys and advertising. This is the least interesting chapter and Lewis is at his lowest in analysis.

In the final chapter, Lewis explains that he has interviewed and explored many more people and stories, but selected only a few to tell that fairly represented the whole. Perhaps Lewis should have just told all of the stories in brief, because then the reader would have been left with a bunch of stories to draw conclusions from, instead of just four or five like there are now. Lewis closes his book with a quote from Leded: "I feel that it is very important to focus on the future right now." Lewis's closing remarks are icing on the cake for the breakdown and in depth explanation he misses throughout the book.

Rating:
Summary: Starts out slow, but picks up the pace soon enough
Review: Michael Lewis describes how the internet revolution has allowed teenagers to influence the stock market, the music industry, and even the interpretation of law itself. Lewis investigated various sites on the internet, and then interviewed the people responsible for the material. Lewis discovered that by masking their identities, teenagers are able to do pretty much anything they want. Fifteen year old Jonathon Lebed manipulates the investment system, making about $800,000. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) forces Jonathon to hand over some but not all of his profits, proving that even the government cannot do anything about the number of kids who are overtaking the business world. The next kid that Lewis interviewed is also a fifteen year old boy, Marcus Arnold from Perris California. Marcus disguises himself as an attorney, offering free legal advice to whoever needed it. Even after revealing his true identity Marcus ends up #1 on AskMe.Com. Finally Lewis interviews a fourteen year old British boy a follower of the creator of Gnutella, a web-based file sharing program. Lewis also reveals that it was a mastermind nineteen year old who was responsible for the worldwide file sharing system, Napster.
It is always interesting to find out that kids have the power to change the world. Although this book was a bit of a slow read at first, it soon picked up its pace.
I recommend this book to everyone, especially teenagers. Also if you're a big internet fan, this book might inspire you to do who knows what.

Rating:
Summary: Slow start, but picks up the pace soon enough
Review: The internet revolution has allowed teenagers to influence the stock market, the music industry, and even the interpretation of law itself. Lewis investigated various sites on the internet, and then interviewed the people responsible for the material. Lewis discovered that by masking their identities, teenagers are able to do pretty much anything they want. Fifteen year old Jonathon Lebed manipulates the investment system, making about $800,000. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) forces Jonathon to hand over some but not all of his profits, proving that even the government cannot do anything about the number of kids who are overtaking the business world. The next kid that Lewis interviewed is also a fifteen year old boy, Marcus Arnold from Perris California. Marcus disguises himself as an attorney, offering free legal advice to whoever needed it. Even after revealing his true identity Marcus ends up #1 on AskMe.Com. Finally Lewis interviews a fourteen year old British boy a follower of the creator of Gnutella, a web-based file sharing program. Lewis also reveals that it was a mastermind nineteen year old who was responsible for the worldwide file sharing system, Napster.
It is always interesting to find out that kids have the power to change our world. Although the book started off slow, it soon picked up the pace. I recommend this everyone, especially teenagers. Also if you're an internet fan, this book might inspire you to do who knows what.

Rating:
Summary: 3 out of 5 (chapters) are not bad
Review: To hear Michael Lewis tell it, the Internet is being controlled in large part by teenage boys, whose parents have absolutely no idea what their children are doing in front of the computer until word comes from the outside that something unusual is happening under their roofs. Take for example, Jonathan, a fifteen-year-old teenager from New Jersey, who was so successful in picking stocks that he day-traded his way into buying a $41,000 Mercedes SUV before he could even drive. In the process, he invited a call from the SEC who wanted to know how he made over $800,000 in profits in the stock market, $285,000 of which the SEC demanded he return. Marcus, another fifteen-year old became the most sought-after purveyor of legal advice on AskMe.com even though he had never taken a law course, or even read a "boring" legal book in his life. Criminal law was Marcus's specialty and aside from the hundreds of questions he answered each day over the Internet, hundreds more letters from adults were sent to him through the regular mail, much to the puzzlement of his parents. Daniel, another teenager in the middle of nowhere in England, became the leading expert on Gnutella, the Napster substitute that sprang up when Napster was taken off the Internet for legal reasons. Michael Lewis's visit had Daniel's mum wondering why some best-selling author would be interested in talking with her son who didn't seem to have any life outside of what was on his computer screen.

Lewis has written two books in Next. The first three chapters give the hilarious accounts of how these teenagers create their own personas on the Internet and show their parents' emotional reactions when they are hit with their sons' fame. The last two chapters deal with the loss of privacy, and how audiences are parsed for market research by watching TiVo, Replay or similar computer/television products. Finally, there's an academic argument about how computers play in the social structure of the future through the democratization of knowledge.

Stick with the first chapters and skim over the last two and you'll find yourself laughing outloud at Lewis's observations.

Rating:
Summary: Surfing the revolution
Review: You can't, according to Michael Lewis, understand what is happening on the Internet, "unless you understand the conditions in the real world that led to what is happening on the Internet." And you can't understand those unless you go there in person and have a look around.

In this book Lewis takes a look and reports on three startling teenagers. Markus Arnold, too young to drive, becomes the leading legal expert on askme.com. He answers up to a hundred questions a day on everything from legal rights, to murder to fraud. Fourteen year Daniel Sheldon from the North of England is too poor to take up a partial scholarship to a school for gifted children. In his quest for digital socialism, he spends his spare time networking around the world to develop peer-to-peer file sharing systems, successors of copyright breaking programmes such as Napstar.

And Jonathan Lebed who netted $800 000 as a day trader and became the youngest person (15) accused of stock-market fraud by the SEC. As Michael Lewis said, when he first read the newspaper reports, he didn't understand them, not just what the kid was supposed to have done wrong, he didn't understand what the kid had actually done.

Lewis has the ability to capture the Zeitgeist of an era. At the end of the eighties, Liar's Poker captured the greed of the bond market. At the end of the nineties, The New New Thing showed how Silicon Valley was redefining the American economy. In 2002 it is the Internet.

Today the hype of the Internet has been followed by casual acceptance - that all it does is to increase the speed of information flow". Lewis imagines a crusty old baron, blasted out of his castle, looking at his first cannon and saying: "All it does is speed up balls - that is all."

Just as the cannon changed the social order of Europe, the Internet is redefining insiders and outsiders, thereby creating profound social shifts. Lewis's stories and comments are funny, thought provoking, and piercingly sharp.