Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over alleged infringement of Java slipped from epic battle to soap opera this week: The relationships between the judge, jury, plaintiff and defendant have become a tangle of legal ambiguity and financial suffering — or is it avarice? The jury deferred to the judge on the extent of Oracle’s intellectual property protections. The judge, in turn, wrested from the jury control over the lion’s share of damages, yanking Oracle’s prize another few inches out of reach. With major issues still to be decided, it is becoming clear that Judge William Alsup holds the high cards - and that he has the tech smarts to play them intelligently and mercilessly.
Think emojis are fun? Now you can send messages that move. A new iPhone app called MyFaceWhen makes it fast and easy to record and send video in the form of animated GIFs attached to text messages.
We've had multimedia messages (MMS) for years, and we're used to static images showing up alongside text messages. Most phones can handle audio and video recordings, too. But those take a long time to send and receive, and they require the recipient to click 'play' to see the message.
Spicing up a text message with an animated GIF is way better, and MyFaceWhen makes it incredibly easy. Wave hello, smile or spin around in circles, and instead of text, a still photo or a poop emoji, your friend will instantly see your animated greeting playing in loop, like a cartoon.
If you can get over the app's name and somewhat offputting icon, MyFaceWhen is phenomenally easy to use. It launches surprisingly fast, which is crucial if you're trying to record something spontaneously. It launches straight to the camera in video mode, and a big "Record" button sits in the center of the screen. You can flip between the front and back camera as usual.
Record your video and then tap the center of the screen again. You'll see the preview as a video. If you like it, hit the big yellow "SAVE" button, and the app will convert the video into a small GIF in seconds. Then it takes you to a grid view of all the GIFs you've recorded, with the new one shown first. In a couple taps, you can copy it to your clipboard. When you copy it, it even gives you a handy button to switch over to the Messages app. All you have to do is paste a GIF into a text message and send it. Recipients with iPhones and many (but not all) other smartphones will see it pop up in a familiar chat bubble with the animation looping away.
Whether it's hilarious pet antics or just you waving hello, communication by animated GIF makes everybody involved feel warm and fuzzy. If you're in a situation where you need to send video quickly - a sporting event, a momentous occasion, a protest in the streets - GIFs will upload much faster than video files.
And you don't have to send your GIFs via text or iMessage. Since they're copied to the clipboard, you can send them as email or any other GIF-friendly way.
The GIFs produced by MyFaceWhen are quite small and highly compressed, but this is an advantage. They're big enough to get the point across but small enough to send quickly without eating up your data plan.
Other animated GIF apps, like Gifture, go after the Instagram vibe. They let users apply filters, be artsy and share to the Web and social networks. MyFaceWhen is more personal. It expands the range of emotions you can express in an iMessage conversation.
The app is free on the App Store, so it's definitely worth a try.
Facebook became a publicly traded company a few hours ago, but it's not wasting any time making new moves. The social networking giant acquired Karma, a mobile app for finding and sending gifts to one's friends and family. By buying the social gifting app, Facebook pushes further into the mobile space it so desperately hopes to conquer.
Karma relies on its users' Facebook accounts to find their friends and determine when important dates in those friends' lives happen to be. The most obvious use case is birthdays, but the app is much smarter than that. For example, it knows that a friend of mine recently landed a new job in New York and that another friend just graduated.
From there, Karma recommends a number of gifts to send to that person, from baby booties to whiskey rocks. You can break down gifts by the type of person you're sending them to. Are they a foodie? A geek? Tap the appropriate tab to filter gifts accordingly.
"The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force," wrote Karma cofounders Ben Lewis and Lee Linden in the acquisition announcement. "By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways."
The acquisition is Facebook's first as a public company, and one that comes a few weeks after it announced the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for close to $1 billion.
Karma already has Facebook baked thoroughly into the experience, so the acquisition makes perfect sense. This is precisely the kind of social commerce service that Facebook strives to provide its users, and it doesn't hurt that it's a mobile application, an area in which the company has acknowledged it needs to do better. This also helps diversify Facebook's revenue beyond social advertising.
What to do with that $500 cash balance burning a hole in my IRA?
Buy Facebook. It ended up being so much easier than they said it would be.
My initial limit order with a maximum price of $45 for 10 shares was placed early this morning after I heard a report on Bloomberg television that Facebook was allotting anywhere from 15% to 25% of its 421 million shares for retail customers, and that lots of average Joes were filling orders for the $38 per share opening price.
A lot of people must have had the same idea, as that order was canceled with a backup of orders, cancellations and changes that delayed Facebook’s open by a full 30 minutes. But at 1 p.m. EST, I resubmitted my order for 10 shares, and within seconds I had confirmation from Sharebuilder that I now owned a very small slice of Facebook.
I got in at $40.94 per share. With the brokerage commission, I have sunk $419.35 into the third biggest IPO of all time.
Why was it so easy to get in? Because it turns out that Facebook as an IPO wasn’t that hot after all, at least from a Wall Street point of view. Facebook still walks away with its $16 billion and its valuation of more than $100 billion, but many people who thought their Facebook shares were winning lottery tickets are disappointed.
Facebook closed at $38.21 today, up just 0.61% and nowhere near the $100 that Bloomberg News was predicting at one point early this morning. The average tech stock finished its first day of trading up 32%, and the average one-day increase among the relatively few social media companies that have gone public had been 42%.
While the volume set a first-day record as analysts had predicted, the volatility was nowhere near what analysts had expected. Facebook never dipped below its original price of $38 and traded as high as $45, but spent most of the day hugging the $40 mark. In the final hour of trading the price started falling as big investors opted to get out before the weekend.
Facebook's lackluster performance dragged down other social media stock prices. Facebook didn't dip below its $38 offering price because of underwriter overallotments that propped up the price, and delays by Nasdaq in confirming orders may have also kept the price down. But by every Wall Street definition the IPO was a bust. Typically, stocks that don't post double-digit gains on their first day of trading take longer to offer returns, if they ever offer returns.
Warren Buffett I am not: I have a 401(k) from a previous employer and an IRA which, until today, was divided between (what I am told) is a healthy mix of index funds. I have been covering business for 15 years and about the only thing I know is that predicting the intricacies of the stock market is best left to the pros.
Or left to chance.
But definitely not left to me.
At the same time, there was that $500 that hadn’t yet been automatically invested in the index funds....
This was an experiment, not an investment for me. I’m not concerned that I’m down for the day, and those 10 shares will most likely sit in my IRA for years to come. I know my three-figure investment may one day grow to four, five or even six figures. I also know it may not.
And, after all, I still cover Facebook for ReadWriteWeb. For now, my paltry 10 shares aren’t enough to keep me from being objective, and I’ll continue to be one of the company’s biggest critics.
Of course, if Facebook explodes and eight years from now is trading at about 100 times its IPO price, as Google now is, we may have to reconsider my ability to cover Facebook objectively.
A guy can dream, after all, can't he?
Venture capitalists have been getting a black eye to go with their blue shirts. A recent report from the Kauffman Foundation slammed VCs for “shortchanging” investors, pointing out that public markets deliver better returns. The next day, Fred Wilson, general partner at Union Square Ventures and prominent VC blogger, suggested that a flood of crowdfunding money unleashed by the JOBS Act could sweep away venture capitalists altogether.
It could happen.
“The game has changed,” says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation who’s focused on entrepreneurship, innovation and the future of risk capital. “It’s obvious to everyone in the industry that crowdfunding is no longer just a toy.”
For startups, it’s now a realistic option to traditional sources like first-tier VCs. And that could spell trouble for the guys on Sand Hill Road. “For the most part, VCs add very little value, so it’s not surprising that if you can get a high-liquidity, low-maintenance form of early-stage funding for your startup, that will pretty quickly push aside more traditional capital providers like bad VCs,” Kedrosky says.
Fred Wilson pointed out that if every American decided to allocate one percent of his or her liquid net worth to crowdfunding, that’d add up to $300 billion - 10 times the amount now sloshing around in the venture sector. And while the chance of that happening has been pooh-poohed by some observers, Kedrosky calls $300 billion “a credible number.”
Going Mainstream
Crowdfunding has yet to hit the mainstream, but it’s getting there. There are vehicles on the way that will help casual investors allocate a piece of their paycheck to startup ventures the same way they deduct now for a 401(k). “Then,” Kedrosky says, “this becomes a tsunami.”
But Kedrosky thinks it’d be “a disaster” if it happened. “It could end up destroying the marketplace. I love vandalism as much as the next punk, but I’m very leery of embracing the idea of even more money flowing into the venture industry. The problem fundamentally is subpar returns - and the reason for that is there’s already too much money in the industry.”
Back to Wilson’s point. What will happen if and when the crowdfunding fire hose gets turned to full blast? Will VCs be crowded out?
Some of them will.
If the market is made more liquid, bid-ask spreads will contract. Deals will be priced higher, returns will drop and the market will be an option for only the top players. Big-brand VC firms will survive but others will go the way of Palm - or be forced to become Series B and C investors.
Who Is This Good For?
So, more freewheeling crowdfunders and fewer meddlesome VCs. For startups, that might seem a positive trend.
Not so fast.
Crowdfunders are fickle. They may crawl all over you on a first date but not take your calls when it’s time for follow-on rounds. “Crowdfunding is great for the shiny new thing,” Kedrosky says. “But the acid test is, if you hit a speed wobble with your company, can you raise a subsequent round of funding? The early record on multiround financing is not good.”
VCs have noted this and tuned their pitches accordingly, telling startups that only they will be there in sickness and in health. “While VCs are not as good about sticking around in bad times as they claim they are,“ Kedrosky says, "they are still much better than crowdfunding seems to be.”
VCs - at least the good ones - won’t be going away. But Kedrovsky finds it entertaining to watch the industry confront the creative destruction that so many of its evangelists preach:
“The amusing part for me is that if you go back to orthodox disruptive-innovation thinking, which VCs love - the old Clay Christensen stuff - the hallmark of innovation is that incumbents dismiss it initially as a toy… Look how VCs have responded to crowdfunding. They call it a toy. They say, ‘Sure, it’s good for little lifestyle companies, but it’s not good for venture-type companies.’ It’s lovely how disruptive thinking has come back to bite them in the ass.”
Image courtesy of jan kranendonk / Shutterstock.com.
If you are thinking about changing your online payment provider, you should take a moment to look at an interesting infographic from application performance management company New Relic. Turns out the most popular provider, PayPal, isn't even close to being the fastest processor. That distinction goes to Google Checkout. PayPal has the market share, but if performance is the critical metric for your company, you might want to consider the alternatives.
New Relic pulled data from more than 20,000 enterprise customers during one day in April and examined which gateways were the most often used, along with their associated transaction speeds. The company monitors 38 billion transactions every day and its larger customers include Nike, Groupon, Zynga and Intuit.
As you can see from the infographic, PayPal is certainly popular, with more than 66,000 transactions and nearly 60% of the market share. But Google Checkout is the fastest, at a quarter of a second on average, and even its longest time to process a payment was a relatively speedy five seconds. (PayPal's longest time was nearly 10 seconds, which was still faster than some of the other processing gateways.)
Obviously, you aren't going to choose a payment gateway based solely on performance. There are plenty of other factors to consider, including what kind of banking and credit card relationships you have, whether you use any merchant software, and where in the world you are located (New Relic included statistics from Australian companies, for example, which had some of the slowest connections).
But speed is certainly an important consideration when selecting how you will process your transactions. Studies done by StrangeLoop Networks, Amazon and Google found big drops in sales and traffic when their Web pages took longer to load. For example, a half-second delay will cause a 20% drop in Google's traffic, and a tenth-of-a-second delay can cause a drop of 1% in Amazon's sales. Shaving a few tenths of a second to finish processing someone's payment can mean the difference in some big dollars.
Of course, you can easily waste any performance edge if other parts of your website are sluggish, since your potential customers may drop off before they even get to the payment page. But savvy e-commerce operators do everything they can to speed throughput, and payment processing times are an important component of that. Food for thought.
If Facebook’s massive IPO represents the wealth created by the rise of social networking, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT, these tectonic shifts hold dramatic challenges to old-line technology companies built on yesterday’s revolutions. So even as Facebook mints a crowd of new millionaires and billionaires, Hewlett-Packard is preparing to send pink slips to some 30,000 of its employees.
All those people busy social networking on smartphones and tablets are spending less time accessing Web pages on a PC. And while companies like HP and Dell are counting on the release of Windows 8 later this year to help stem the tide, many observers believe a new PC operating system simply won’t be enough to reverse the waning clout of Windows PCs.
The contrast is stark. In Menlo Park, 3,500+ Facebook employees are celebrating their record-setting initial public offering. But just down the freeway in neighboring Palo Alto, HP is targeting the elimination of almost 10 times as many positions. The company is reportedly considering eliminating 25,000 to 30,000 of the company’s 320,000 jobs, about 8%. Apparently, CEO Meg Whitman’s plan is to use the savings to direct more than $1 billion toward building the tablets and cloud services that are reshaping the Internet. Details are expected to be revealed next Wednesday when HP releases its earnings.
Saving Money for Investment?
But is money the real issue here? Or is it about trying to deal with unprecedented levels of creative destruction?
So far, HP’s attempts to chase the new directions in computing have failed miserably. The company paid $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010, hoping to take its WebOS into tablets and other mobile devices. Roughly a year and a half later, HP shuttered its TouchPad tablet and tossed plans to make WebOS the software engine in consumer hardware products.
While many of HP’s wounds are self-inflicted, they also reflect the remarkable speed with which the computer market is shifting to mobile devices. In the next five years, tablets are expected to displace notebook-style computers to become the dominant personal computing platform, according to Forrester Research.
The trend is already well underway among the millennial generation, people born between 1980 and 2000. In the U.S., 30% of tablet owners in this age group have purchased a tablet in place of a PC. These young adults don’t want unwieldy laptops. They want computers that are light, easy to use and capable of sharing pictures and video on social networks. They want apps on a mobile device, not a new version of Windows.
Windows 8 Won't Fix Things
That’s why many analysts no longer expect the release of Windows 8 to jumpstart PC sales for HP - or anyone else. Whatever slick features Windows 8 introduces, a new PC operating system just doesn’t have the market power it used to have. “Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment, at least out of the gate,” Keith Bachman, an analyst for BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a research note, according to Reuters.
HP can still make lots of money off PCs for a few years. Tablets need more time to get the power and applications needed to be able to handle all the tasks performed on laptops. But the growth is clearly coming in other areas.
In the meantime, HP needs a credible iPad-killer tablet and a laptop in the relatively hot ultrathin and light category, where Apple’s MacBook Air is king. Finding an entre back into the smartphone market wouldn’t hurt either.
Time Is Running Out
In addition, HP has to move faster into cloud computing to hold onto enterprise customers less willing to shell out big bucks for HP services centered around on-premise software and hardware. Those expensive solutions are increasingly competing against (perhaps) less powerful but much cheaper consumer-class services.
It won’t be easy. And it won’t be without pain, as 30,000 HP workers are about to learn the hard way. But time is running out for old-fashioned computer vendors like HP.
Whitman photo by megwhitman2010. Zuckerberg photo by Crunchies2009. Photo illustration by ReadWriteWeb.
Procter & Gamble should be kicking itself for not developing a mobile operating system when it had the chance: More people worldwide own mobile phones than toothbrushes. Get ready for a tsunami of mobile marketing and commerce to crash on the shores of retail.
The beauty of mobile devices from a marketing perspective is that you can reach consumers at a more personal level – right in their pockets. The Holy Grail of marketers used to be a home telephone number and address. Direct mail and telemarketing, despite being some of the most hated forms of advertising, are historically effective. Now mobile takes marketers closer to consumers than direct mail ever will.
But mobile isn't just one marketing channel. It's several. Think about how you use your smartphone. You use apps, you search the Net, you visit websites. You text friends and family.
“The challenge for global brands in mobile is finding relevancy to the various activities a consumer may be performing at any given time. The misconception is that mobile is a new marketing channel, when in reality it is several new channels, all with vastly different implications for brand marketers,” said Jeff Peden, CEO of Boston-based local advertising startup Crave Labs.
The trend toward mobile marketing and commerce is significant, and it's only going to grow. According to research firm Deloitte, 19% of merchants said they plan to invest $100,000 or more on mobile platforms. The money will go toward building apps, delivering through the various marketing channels that mobile affords and providing services for other businesses. About 22.5% of businesses are seeing the most traction in business-to-business mobile solutions while 33.7% are gaining mobile momentum in the business-to-consumer sector. Overall, 37% of enterprise companies have seen significant impact on their top and bottom line revenue through mobile.
Reaching consumers is a big part of the game, but it is only a start. The goal is to generate transactions. This is where relevance comes in. How do marketers achieve relevance through mobile?
“Tying into the context of the consumer (location, time of day, et cetera) improves relevancy in these cases," Peden said. "In the case of search, brands should be directing consumers to the closest place of action, turning that immediate local intent into a physical transaction. In other modes, such as gaming or video, the content of an ad has to be just as rich and compelling as the app in which it's running."
These observations aren't just theoretical. Nearly 29% of consumers who research a product in a retail location through a smartphone end up purchasing that product online. Mobile commerce is expected to be a $163 billion market by 2015. Companies that focus on mobile solutions for consumers will reap the greatest reward. Procter & Gamble could sell more toothbrushes if it used a location-aware price comparison app for shopping lists. Amazon has been a leader in price-comparison shopping and its strength in m-commerce should only grow as the ecosystem expands and smartphone users come to rely on their devices' in-store utility.
The infographic below, courtesy of Deloitte, serves as a rough map to the biggest m-commerce opportunities for developers, brands and retailers.
Click here for a larger version of the infographic.
Facebook became a $104.2 billion company Friday in much the same way it became the world’s biggest social network and a cultural game-changer: by stubbornly forging ahead despite criticism and calls that it couldn’t be done.
Last week, rumors turned into full-blown financial news stories that the initial public offering was getting a lukewarm reception in road-show presentations to investors in New York City, Boston and Palo Alto, Calif. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was criticized for wearing his trademark hoodie to the event in New York and skipping the event altogether in Boston, and some analysts said Facebook could open with a value as low as $75 billion.
And yet, by this week Facebook had raised its expected share price and was making more shares available to meet demand. By the close of markets Thursday afternoon, Facebook had set its opening share price at $38 (after considering levels as high as $40). Whatever happens in trading today, Facebook will be the third-largest IPO in history and will net the company $16 billion.
“It shows tremendous confidence in the guy wearing the hoodie,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, told Bloomberg. “He hasn’t specified how he’s going to do it, but he’ll have to do it to justify this price.”
But share price doesn't really matter. The most important number for now is that $104.2 billion. The $100 billion marker is symbolic, as is so much that surrounds Facebook’s evolution into a publicly traded company. Beyond the hoodie, Zuckerberg has been sending all sorts of signals that he’ll be a different kind of CEO, from his decision to not travel to New York to ring today’s opening Nasdaq bell, to celebrating the IPO not with champagne but with Red Bull (the company had one of its famed hackathons last night).
And while $104.2 billion can (and will) change as Facebook ebbs and flows through the ups and downs of being a publicly traded company, at least for now it makes the eight-year-old company more valuable than all but a handful of U.S. companies. Facebook is bigger than McDonald’s, bigger than Citigroup and - also symbolically - bigger than Amazon, arguably the biggest success story from the first dot-com boom.
“Facebook is here to stay,” Navin Chaddha, a managing director of the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm, told The New York Times. “It’s a virtual economy where people are spending more time than any other Internet property.”
Still, its stock is still highly speculative, leaving investors unsure of what to do. A steady stream of them have been interviewed on cable television and all make the same basic point: Invest in the company and you may see it wither, much as Groupon, last year’s IPO darling, did. Skip putting money down, however, and you may kick yourself if Facebook ends up like Google, which now trades about 100 times higher than its IPO price.
At its open this morning, Facebook was trading at 100 times its earnings for the previous 12 months. By comparison, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index trades at 14 times earnings. People who run the price up today are mainly buying into the hype, and may be too late: The true short-term winners are the company’s early investors, people who bought shares on private exchanges and Zuckerberg (his stake is now worth about $19 billion).
“It could take many years to calculate Facebook’s impact,” Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising company WPP, told The New York Times. “There’s a lot of pressure for them to monetize their content and demonstrate productivity, but you can’t do it overnight.”
Startup entrepreneurs live, eat and breathe their companies. Catching a quick catnap under your desk counts as a good night's sleep. But how do you get the same level of commitment from mere employees?
Typically, the answer has been to award them significant chunks of the company in the form of stock and options. It’s not just greed. Sharing equity in your business early on can lead to complex problems as your company grows. Luckily, there are ways to motivate workers without giving away the store.
1. Show them you care. Tech entrepreneurs are notorious for their lack of social skills, so if you’ve got your head buried in your laptop all day, pull it out and spend some time with your team. Find out about the personal stuff. Ask what they like to do in their free time. (Not only will this help you better bond with your team, but it will also give you new ideas for how to motivate them.) Managing by walking around isn’t a quaint idea from the 1990s, and shouldn’t just be lip service.
2. Tailor your rewards. Not everyone is motivated by the same stuff. By finding out what your employees like to do, you can tailor how you reward them to match their interests. (And you lower the possibility of making an oafish mistake, like giving a recovering alcoholic a bottle of wine.) For example, if one of your guys is a surf nut, cut him slack to hit the waves early in the morning. If another employee loves baseball, tickets to the local team’s next game - and the afternoon off to attend it - could go a long way to keeping her revved up.
3. Give the gift of time. Employees at a growing tech startup don’t get much time off, so when you do hit some downtime, let your team take advantage of it. If everyone’s been crunching on a project all weekend, let them come in late on Monday. Finish a big job? Celebrate by sending everyone home early. Yes, they might be back working early the next morning, but they’ll be more refreshed.)
4. Get flexible. When you can, let your staff work from home, from Starbucks, from the beach or wherever. In the early stages of a startup, it does often help to all be in a room together, but when the project doesn’t call for that, be flexible. Even if you do need your entire team to work in one place, that place doesn’t have to be your company’s office. Sometimes you can get more out of people by changing the scenery. With Wi-Fi just about everywhere today, you may be able to work at your apartment’s pool, your favorite bar or a park.
5. Be understanding. If you’re going to make extraordinary demands of your team (and we all know you are), there will come a time when they crack. Learn to spot the signs that someone is about to go over the edge, and take steps to deal with the situation before it gets out of control. Whether a team member needs to vent, run out the door (literally) or just knock off for the day, let them do what they need to get back in the game.
6. Barter for stuff. Trade favors with other business owners you know to get perks for your team. For example, you might offer to update a spa’s website in return for them giving your team massages every Friday. Get creative.
7. Eat, drink and be merry. When all else fails, don’t underestimate the healing power of hanging out. No, it’s not free, but a little recreational togetherness is relatively cheap. Bring in pizza, have Friday keggers or head out for happy hour once in a while — on you. It’s an affordable investment in your employees’ sanity that will pay off in greater dedication and productivity.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Today's theme is the funny-looking future. Humans have been dreaming of the era of air and space flight for a long time. But now that we're here, it turns out the future isn't always as romantic as we expected it to be.
Look at how ugly some of our best inventions are.
The U.S. military demonstrated a totally goofy hovering person-platform in 1955.
Here's video of the new Chinese J-20 Mighty Dragon fighter jet, which looks like those silverfish you find crawling in your bathtub.
In fact, here's a huge photo album of weird-looking planes.
Someone posted a YouTube video of what appears to be an armed Predator drone flying around over populated areas of Illinois. "That's an odd little plane," the cameraman says.
The space shuttle Discovery has been powered down for the last time. We love the shuttle for what it accomplished, but let's admit it: It wasn't the sleekest spaceship you can imagine.
For that matter, the spacecraft that landed on the moon was one of the strangest-looking things people have ever made!
Image via Edwin Verin / Shutterstock.com.
Past entries from Read/Write Daily
Facebook, whose stock is trading on public markets for the first time today, has had an incredible rise - from zero to 900 million users in just over eight years. In the fast-changing technology world, though, today's Facebook can quickly become tomorrow's MySpace. Make no mistake: Everyone's favorite social network faces substantial risks. Here are a few.
Facebook's biggest driver of usage - and revenue - comes from the old, desktop-PC web. But as people start spending more time on mobile devices, and more people get online for the first time only on mobile devices, Facebook could lose its edge. The biggest risk, then, is the rise of a mobile-only or mobile-first social network that steals the attention and hearts of its users.
The good news: For now, Facebook is doing pretty well on mobile devices. It has more than 500 million mobile-active users as of last month; more than half its users. It recently acquired Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing network, previously one of its biggest existing threats. There's also a potential upside: If Facebook were to become a mobile platform - the way Apple's iOS and Google's Android are - it could open doors for many future businesses.
But that's also a big challenge. And right now, Facebook's mobile products aren't exactly great. Facebook's iPhone app, for example, is slow and uninspired. Something better may come along that Facebook can't beat, clone or buy. Meanwhile, Facebook admits in its IPO filing that it does not "currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven."
The vast majority of Facebook's revenue - 85% last year - comes from advertising: Those little ads you see on the right side of your Facebook window. It's a decent business, with $1 billion in profit last year, but it's not a killer business. The big question is whether Facebook will be able to build additional revenue streams as big as or bigger. To make a Microsoft analogy, Facebook has its Windows, but can it find its Office?
Google, for what it's worth, hasn't been able to build another business as big as its ad business. But it hasn't needed to yet. And there's a big difference between Google's ads and Facebook's ads, as startup investor and founder Chris Dixon explains in a recent blog post.
"The good news for Facebook," he writes, "is there is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places. The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends."
Will Facebook figure out how to put its ads near a service where people have more purchasing intent? A social search engine, for example? Or will Facebook's payments business - 15% of its sales last year - grow to become bigger than its ad business? It will probably be years before those questions find answers.
Losing its Leadership and Recruiting EdgeFacebook has already weathered significant staff turnover: Many early employees, already rich from the company's success, have left to do other things, such as starting their own companies or becoming professional investors. Facebook has, for the most part, been able to recruit good replacements. With Mark Zuckerberg at the helm and COO Sheryl Sandberg as deputy, Facebook has seemed stable for years.
But Sandberg is about to become a billionaire. Many other employees will become millionaires. And the recruiting lure of pre-IPO shares is gone. Will Facebook be able to keep its leaders and continue recruiting the brightest engineers at reasonable prices? Or will it gradually lose out to competitors?
Those are three big risks for Facebook. But in its IPO filing, it lists many others, some large, some small. These include: Failing to keep or attract new users; failing to introduce new, improved or popular products; potential for concerns over privacy, safety or security; technical problems (a big challenge for MySpace and Friendster that helped Facebook leapfrog both); and loss of advertisers.
In general, things seem to be going well for Facebook, so it's not as though users, fans, employees or investors should be particularly worried. But it's important to keep an eye on the risks and the competition. In this industry, for a site that has grown as fast as Facebook has by blowing past competitors, it's important to bear in mind that what goes up can easily come down.
Related: Tech's Doomsday Plots: How Your Favorite Tech Giants Could Lose Their Edge
Large companies often have trouble breaking into new revenue-generating vertical markets. As Facebook barrels into its much-anticipated initial public offering today, the question for investors and analysts will be: How does Facebook start making money from its huge mobile presence? While it may seem like Facebook has completely dropped the ball on mobile monetization, there is plenty of time and avenues for the social behemoth to make money from its mobile eyeballs.
To understand where Facebook is with its mobile products, one must understand the problems that big companies deal with in rolling out new revenue-generating products. There are four phases, which author Geoffrey Moore calls “horizons,” for revenue-generating products at any given company:
Right now, the challenge for Facebook is to take its mobile monetization strategies and any resulting new products out of Horizon 3, see them through Horizon 2, and firmly establish them as Horizon 1 products. Many large companies struggle with Horizon 2 because of the need to allocate resources to a project that may not see actual revenue any time soon. It is a critical stage for a company as it looks to expand its categorical product portfolio.
In its initial S-1 filing for its IPO, Facebook identified making money from mobile as perhaps its biggest risk. We analyzed the avenues that Facebook could take to make money from mobile and found that there are several distinct directions the company could go, from direct and indirect ad placement, to creating an application store, to payments (Facebook Credits). Most of Facebook’s mobile monetization will come from advertising in one form or another.
Slide from Facebook mobile presentation at f8 in San Francisco in Sept. 2011
“Mobile should be a huge priority for the Facebook team, especially given the IPO. Traffic to social media sites on the Jumptap network from January 2011 – January 2012 grew 107% and had a 28% uplift in CTR for ads on the channel when combined with outside data sources. The social networking channel remains one of the most popular for our top verticals, including auto, retail and CPG," said Paran Johar, CMO at Jumptap. "There is an incredible opportunity for Facebook to monetize their massive mobile presence. Thirty-three percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and 85% of their $3.7 billion in revenue comes from advertising; monetizing mobile is a billion-dollar opportunity."
There are several different types of advertising that Facebook could implement in mobile. The easiest would likely be interstitial and banner ads within Facebook’s native apps and mobile Web presence. That should not be a problem for the company on larger mobile screens, like the iPad, but creating effective ads for screens smaller than five inches has proved problematic not just for Facebook, but almost every other mobile ad network as well.
Facebook can also capitalize on the “interest graph” it has created through its social graph platform and its newer OpenGraph applications, such as The Washington Post Social Reader or SocialCam. This is essentially what Facebook is doing on its desktop platform - targeting ads to people based on their interests. How to achieve that on mobile while still optimizing screen real estate and not alienating users (or infringing on privacy) will be the hardest part for Facebook.
The most alluring prospect for Facebook may have to do with location-aware push notifications. Facebook has recently started adding location to users’ posts on both desktop and mobile platforms. This feature can be turned off, but the way Facebook pushed it out recently to users shows that it is deeply interested in associating location with user updates. A recent Facebook acquisition, ambient social location startup Glancee, could prove very useful in this area. Glancee knows where you are, runs in the background of your phone and tells you when a friend of yours is nearby. When integrated within Facebook, that could be a powerful tool. Thinking a step further though, Facebook could also use Glancee’s technology to connect not just people to people, but also people to stores, merchants and restaurants. All Glancee needs to do is treat physical locations like it does people and add some type of incentive for the user to go to that business, with which Facebook has presumably cut a deal. That could be a location-aware push notification based on your interest graph. For instance, I like sports, I am passing a sports bar that is offering happy-hour specials, I get a push notification. Facebook makes money, the location makes money, I get beer. Everyone is happy.
Then there are the apps. A good portion of Facebook’s revenue is tied to apps in one form or another. The most lucrative of those are games, as Zynga has shown by riding its partnership with Facebook to its own IPO. Facebook’s original intent with its apps ecosystem was to let users spread apps through viral channels in much the same way that Farmville and MafiaWars became popular. That worked for a while and still has potential to be a good source of app enlistment for the company, but Facebook apps needed a boost beyond viral community growth. Hence, the social platform unveiled its App Center last week to act as a central repository for apps tied to the Facebook platform.
The App Center will prove pivotal in the way Facebook approaches mobile monetization. The center can sell mobile Web apps and bolster Facebook's Credits program, but it also can extend Facebook's presence in both the Apple App Store and Android Google Play. There is an interesting advertising opportunity here, as well. What if Facebook were to tie all of the apps that use its platform to its own advertising service? Then, if I am playing Draw Something and seeing ads, those are Facebook ads, not just ads served from some random ad network to which the developer tied its app.
The ability to unleash interest graph-based mobile ads outside of Facebook’s actual owned and operated properties could have great potential both for social app developers and the social platform. Think of it as Google’s AdMob program, but tied to mobile social apps.
The challenge for Facebook now will be to take these varying initiatives (like Glancee, App Center and even Instagram) out of Horizon 3 and push them through Horizon 2. Moore cautions companies that going to market with new categorical revenue generators is extremely difficult and should be done one at a time, so that each can be done right and done quickly. Going to market with new products one at a time has never exactly been Facebook’s strong suit. It likes to, “build fast, break things and fix them" as quickly as possible.
Facebook does not need to institute every idea it has for mobile monetization right away. It just needs to take its best idea, make sure it is as strong as possible and unleash it on the public.
If Facebook can ever figure out how to really make money off of the hundreds of millions of people that use its mobile platform, then there is definitely sunshine on the horizon.
From here on out, Facebook will not be measured by the number of registered users, the number of photos being uploaded every minute or the number of likes and comments left by its more than 900 million members.
Facebook became a publicly traded company at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Friday, and from here on out, Facebook will first and foremost be measured by its share price.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell of Nasdaq, where his company will be listed under the symbol FB. The bell, which Zuckerberg rang remotely from the company's Menlo Park headquarters, was rigged to automatically update his Facebook status to say he had listed a company on the exchange.
The sheer volume of orders for the stock delayed the start of trading by 30 minutes, as traders were flooded with change orders. Zuckerberg had been expected to make comments after U.S. markets opened at 9:30 a.m. Eastern but had not issued a statement by the time Facebook shares started trading two hours later.
Facebook’s share price was set at $38 late Thursday night but quickly rose to $42.99 after 421 million shares of Facebook started trading. [UPDATE: After that increase, the share price dropped back to its initial sale price where it hovered for the rest of the morning.] Analysts and investors were expecting a day of high volume and volatility, as early investors cashed in shares, and people getting their first crack at owning Facebook placed orders through retail brokers. Nasdaq IT officials were on a morning-long conference call to make sure the volume - which is estimated to be at least 500 million shares traded - did not crash the exchange's order-processing system.
It was the third-largest initial public offering in history, netting $16 billion and valuing Facebook at $104.2 billion. It was also arguably the biggest tech story on Wall Street since Google went public in 2004.
“The more we talk about it, the more people at home are going to say ‘I want to own a piece of Facebook’ and not just go on Facebook,” CNBC analyst Jim Cramer told viewers just after Nasdaq opened at 9:30 a.m. ET Friday. “It could overwhelm the market - there is Facebook, which is fabulous, and there is everything else, which is the worst market we have seen in years.”
In spite of grim financial news for the broader markets - and repeated warnings from Cramer that naive investors would run up the price of Facebook - the IPO had a celebratory feel to it, coming a decade after the dot-com bubble burst and five years into a global recession. Anchors on financial news networks wore hoodies over their shirts and ties in deference to Zuckerberg’s trademark outfit. One CNBC commentator called the buildup to the start of trading "the business news equivalent of a car chase." A beaming Zuckerberg was shown flanked by employees, including COO Sheryl Sandberg, as he rang the Nasdaq opening bell in the early-morning hours following the company’s 31st hackathon. Television reporters camped outside the campus gave a blow-by-blow account of what was happening at Facebook at dawn local time, including updates that employees stayed up all night binging on Red bull, working on code, playing roller hockey, ordering Chinese food and making runs to In-N-Out Burger.Still, all of the optimism was tempered by persistent and familiar fears that the company may be overvalued. Facebook opened with a valuation 100 times greater than its earnings for the previous 12 months. If Facebook stumbles, it will have a far-reaching ripple effect across the tech sector and the broader economy."Facebook is the component that will make or break the IPO market," Scott Sweet, of IPO Boutique, told Dow Jones. "It is so powerful and there is so much demand that if the IPO didn't work, the IPO pipeline would immediately freeze."
Facebook goes public Friday. It could be worth well over $100 billion dollars. Want to get a piece of that? It's going to be very tricky for mere mortals to get Facebook stock in the IPO. If you want shares, here's what you have to do.
Basically, if you want Facebook IPO shares, you have to be rich and powerful in order to be taken seriously.
Is Facebook A Good Investment?
"Long, long term, this could turn out to be a very good investment," Kupferberg says. "Do you see people not using it anytime soon?"
Kupferberg says that his firm's model thinks that Facebook is still reasonably valued around $40 per share. But in the very short term, it will be almost impossible for most people to get a piece of Facebook's IPO, and those who do will pay a high price for it. We're not investment counselors at ReadWriteWeb, but if you really want a piece of the Facebook action and didn't buy one on the private market five years ago, it seems like it couldn't hurt to wait a little while for the hype to burn off.
Disclosure: Peter Kupferberg is Jon Mitchell's uncle.
Lead image via Shutterstock
The next iteration of Mac OS X is coming. It doesn't have a launch date yet, but it likely will by the time Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference wraps up next month.
While most of the updates focus on the slow convergence of iOS with the desktop, one unsung gem is sure to delight those of us who rely on the Internet rather than cable for television: AirPlay for Mac.
Just as we already can with our iPads, iPhones and iPods, AirPlay for OS X will allow us to wirelessly mirror the screen of our Macs onto their televisions using Apple TV.
What makes this so exciting for the cord-cutting crowd - and probably somewhat cringeworthy for the network executive crowd - is that there's far more content available on the desktop Web than there is on iOS or any streaming set-top box.
Take Hulu.com, for example. The free version of Hulu's website has long blocked itself from being accessed by Google TV or Boxee. Annoyingly, even the paid Hulu Plus app isn't available on most of these devices. With AirPlay for Mac, TV fans will be able to stream Hulu's content from their televisions for free, at least as long as rumors about the site requiring a cable subscription don't pan out. Hulu is just the beginning.
Although a decent number of video sites have converted to HTML5 since the standard began to emerge (and since Steve Jobs famously spoke his mind about Flash), there are still quite a few sites out there that use Flash to play video back, including those belonging to networks and cable channels.
In many cases, popular shows that aren't available from a source such as Hulu are available on the content provider's website, but rarely in such a way that that content is accessible from an iPad or most streaming boxes. With AirPlay for Mac, that changes.
Even though Boxee and Google TV have Web browsers, they still can't access everything that's on the Web. That's either because of the site owner's preferences or because of issues with the Flash player (an issue that's commonly cited by Boxee Box owners).
Since these devices exist as easily detectable user agents, they can be blocked by scripts or through other means. But a MacBook is a MacBook, and Hulu will never block that. All AirPlay is is a more convenient way to pair it with one's TV.
To that point, you may argue, why not just hook your computer up to your TV using VGA or HDMI? That's easy enough if you have a Mac Mini or laptop and the right cables, but AirPlay will make it easier to do and compatible with less portable machines. For instance, if you have an iMac desktop on the other side of your apartment, you can stream content from that without lugging it over or dealing with long cables.
In theory, streaming from your Mac via the new Apple TV box should support 1080p video, but it's possible that things could get a little laggy on older hardware or on a less-than-stellar network.
The use cases go beyond video content, although that's certainly a huge one. Gamers who want to play desktop games on a bigger screen will be able to do so much more easily, especially if they use an external controller. And it's not just recent, high-impact video games that will find their way to bigger screens this way: Thanks to classic game emulators, it's also an easy way to play old-school Nintendo favorites on the TV.
AirPlay also turns out to be a pretty decent way to beam presentations onto a larger screen, provided it's hooked up to an Apple TV box, which is actually even easier to transport to a business meeting than a laptop is.
Are we or aren’t we? When it comes to social media bubbles and whether or not we’re in one, there is no shortage of people willing to argue on each side of the debate.
It doesn’t matter if Facebook finishes Friday, its first day as a publicly-traded company, with a valuation of $105 billion or $75 billion: The debate is sure to get more intense in the coming weeks, months and possibly years. Earlier this month in the buildup to Facebook’s IPO, we took a look at the social media bubble (or lack thereof) in a five-part series that was based on dozens of interviews with experts on both sides of the divide.
We opened with a comparison between the dot-com bubble to the current period, when social media companies that have no revenue model are being sold for a billion dollars or more. Later on, we compared Facebook just ahead of its IPO to America Online in the period leading up to and following its IPO.
While there is no shortage of bright people willing to argue that we are not in a social media bubble, we tended to land on the side of the argument that we were seeing the same kind of “irrational exuberance” that led to a run-up of dot-com stocks in the late 1990s and the early part of the last decade. Working under the assumption that we were indeed in a social media bubble, we speculated on which companies were likely to survive when the bubble bursts.
Finally, we talked to startup experts and found out whether a bubble was irrelevant to those who were thinking of starting a social media business. Suki Shah, cofounder and CEO at GetHired.com, told us, there may never be a better time to start a social network company.
"Small teams of smart, dedicated, entrepreneurial people are creating significant momentum and innovation in niche areas that really appeal to larger companies," he said. "Regardless of what will happen in the future, serious entrepreneurs need to use this time to set sail."
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Editor's note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.
When Sarah Lacy launched the oddly named PandoDaily earlier this year, the goal was to dislodge Silicon Valley kingmaker TechCrunch, New York media heavyweight AllThingsD, and Wall Street-friendly Business Insider as the daily source of business technology news. Those are three formidable competitors and PandoDaily was competing on the West Coast turf of TechCrunch, Lacy's ex-employer. But Lacy had a couple of aces up her sleeve, in the form of TechCrunch founder Michael "The Dark Knight" Arrington and his earnest Robin, M G Siegler. Unfortunately, the dynamic duo were forced out less than three months later by Lacy. Meanwhile, AllThingsD superheroes Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg have been on a tear this year, often scooping TechCrunch on important business news in the technology sector.
An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:Scoops are the name of the name in business reporting, although a good analytical article - such as Henry Blodget's recent profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg - helps to keep the brand solid. Kara Swisher has become the Queen of Scoops over the past year, usurping Arrington. Swisher does it through good old fashioned reporting graft. She talks to people in the technology sector, day in and day out. A fine example is her scoop yesterday about Pinterest. Along with co-writer Liz Gannes, another extremely talented blogger, Swisher was the first to report the news that image-based social network Pinterest is receiving a $100 million funding round from Japanese company Rakuten.
It's this kind of "one source said" style reporting that wins in the business media:
While the latest round of funding for Pinterest has been the most hotly sought of late in tech circles, one source said Silbermann was looking for a global strategic investor and had talked to several large Asian companies. Said one source on why he settled on Rakuten: “He just really liked them.”
Swisher followed that scoop up by interviewing Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani. Talking to people, it still works in the media game.
It's hard to compete in business reporting unless you get the scoops. PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy is as well-connected as Kara Swisher and she gets good stories too, like a recent post about how six "unlikely investors" got a piece of the recent Evernote $70 million funding round. AllThingsD may be winning the battle for business tech right now, but this is a war that never ends: each day there is a new scoop to be had, it's just a question of who uncovers it first.
SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb's parent company.
Twitter fired another salvo in the privacy wars, announcing that it will allow users to block it from recording their wanderings around the Web. Take that, Facebook!
Twitter announced plans to support the proposed Do Not Track HTTP header, a W3C standard-in-the-making that will let users keep the messaging service from tracking their browsers. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, currently a user "only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns of their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts."
Twitter claims that it does not use such browsing data and deletes it "quickly," according to a Twitter spokesperson, who added that in theory Twitter could use the data to "surface better content" for users.
"Twitter didn't have any documentation on how they handled third-party browsing history," says Brian Kennish, co-founder of Disconnect Tools, which makes anti-tracking software. "I’m really glad to see Twitter make this change now."
Twitter confirmed its commitment to supporting Do Not Track via a tweet from the official @Twitter account. However, the dispatched stopped short of revealing a schedule for implementing the feature. "As the Federal Trade Commission's CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track," said Carolyn Penner, a spokesperson for Twitter. "We applaud the FTC's leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track."
Still, Twitter's timing is impeccable, evoking an implicit comparison with Facebook on the eve of its highly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook has faced ongoing criticism over its privacy policies. The social networking juggernaut does not support Do Not Track.
Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.
The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.
What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?
The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they've never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM's Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.
Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don't know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn't read or write 200 years ago.
300 years ago, Bishay said, "you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane." Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.
The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled "Please Learn to Code," came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise.
“I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they're computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.”
Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they'd have vastly more successful careers.”
Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.
Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat - I'd learn the local language posthaste.
At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There's little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.
Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock
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