Facebook is forthcoming about the challenges of mobile: No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem; and they don’t control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB at current valuations, this would be it.
Tag Archive: digital media
Keep It Under Your Hat: Valuation Caps and the $650 Million Sale of MySpace for $125 Million
Valuation caps can shape the fundamentals of an exit, redistribute value among stakeholders, or even kill a deal altogether. Never missing an opportunity for a good war story, I’d like to revisit one high-profile transaction, the $650 million acquisition of MySpace by Fox Interactive Media in 2005.
South by Social Media: Improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio
It’s impossible to capture all of the ideas, experiences, people, products, pitches, events of such a huge, intense event in one blog post. A few thoughts and resources to cut through the chatter:
Silicon Valley After the Dot-Com Crash: An Insider Perspective
After the last ops and engineering staff were laid off, I remember wandering through the cavernous, deserted NOC, strewn with assorted equipment that was left to be carted off to auction, looking up at the huge projection screens that forlornly flickered “No Signal.” It felt downright post-apocalyptic, with huge diesel generators out back standing ready to provide backup power to a NOC and data center that no longer needed it.
Web 2.0 Summit 2010 – Thought Leaders Ponder the “Battelle” for the Network Economy
This week, industry leaders, pundits, journalists and assorted hangers-on are gathering in San Francisco for the annual Web 2.0 Summit, one of the online industry’s most influential events. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly moderate conversations with a long list of Web luminaries, including Eric Schmidt, Carol Bartz, Marc Benioff, Reed Hastings, Peter Chernin, Tony Hsieh, Evan Williams, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Pincus, Ron Conway, John Doerr, and Fred Wilson.
If You Build It, They Will Abuse It
As a completely made-up statistic, assume that 0.01% of users are sociopaths or predators who cause serious damage to the community and its other members. With 10,000 users, that’s one guy. With a million, it’s a hundred people. With 100 million registered users — the scale at MySpace when I left — it’s ten thousand. That kind of math illustrates why every major consumer Internet company has an abuse team that serves as the first line of defense against all kinds of ugliness.
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