Posts tagged means
Facebook Files IPO: What It Means For You
Feb 1st
Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today.
The filing was the first glimpse into the company’s inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company’s shares begins trading – a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion.
Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology to the guy who makes money. (He could be worth $20 billion when all is said and done). And it also means today is the day you stop being a Facebook user and become a Facebook customer.
That can mean good and bad things for you, the end user. But one thing is certain: Facebook will never be the same again.
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For starters, Facebook’s success will no longer be judged by the number of users (which is expected to top a billion sometime in August). From here on out, Facebook will be judged by its share price, market cap, P/E ratio and a whole host of other Wall Street jargon. Pay no attention to Zuckerbeg’s assertion that the company won’t be beholden to quarterly reports: they will (just ask Jeff Bezos, who made a similar promise when Amazon went public).
And, by the way, those numbers are impressive: Facebook had revenue of $3.71 billion last year, up from $1.96 billion in 2010 and $777 million in 2009.
The good news is that happy customers (which, in this case include Facebook users and companies that advertise of Facebook) can often translate into happy shareholders. The changes, to be certain, will be subtle at first, but over the coming months and years, here’s what to expect:
Wealth Inhibits Drive
Zuckerberg isn’t the only Facebook employee who stands to gain life-changing wealth as a result of today’s filing. Facebook hires in the past year have at least known that the company was pushing towards a public offering and they stood to profit, and employees who have been there longer may have held out in anticipation of today’s announcement. About a third of Facebook’s 3,000 employees could become instant millionaires on the first day shares trade.
And that could spell trouble, according to Peter Jackson. Jackson is a Silicon Valley pioneer who took Introware public during the dot-com boom. At one point, his own wealth was placed at $300 million, and many company secretaries were millionaires. Eventually, however, the firm went bankrupt.
“The parking lot used to be full from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.,” Jackson told Bloomberg News. “Right after we went public, people were showing up at nine o’clock and they were leaving at five. There were a lot more things to do once you had a lot more money.”
Getting Out After Cashing Out
Facebook will also face new challenges in trying to keep many of those 3,000 workers. Lost in the comparisons to Google’s 2004 IPO is that many employees who worked for years building Google into an IPO-ready company have since left, including current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Indeed, one of the first parts of the IPO filing many investors turned to was the section covering its employees and talent. Potential investors at least want to know that Facebook has been able to retain employees and avoid turnover in the year or so leading up to the IPO.
Writing at CNN.com, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff says some of these factors may already be in play.
“If a company is big enough – and that means simply holding enough money – then sooner or later that money influences the rest of the company’s activities,” he said. “The promise of cashing in a few million dollars worth of stock options helps many a programmer make it through a late night of coding.”
Meet The New Boss – Not The Same As The Old Boss
One of the reasons Facebook has been successful is that it has been able to wait out initial reactions to everything from changes in its privacy policies to big site overhauls like the introduction of Timeline.
The knee-jerk responses of the stock market, as well as the quarterly report cards that come in the form of earnings reports, may mean Facebook innovations post-IPO won’t have as much time to incubate before Facebook has to make a decision on whether or not to push forward with new initiatives.
Timeline, for example, was originally announced in September but a full rollout was repeatedly delayed as Facebook tweaked it to make it more appealing to users. It was finally rolled out network-wide last month. Had it been introduced after Facebook went public, the four months it took Facebook to perfect Timeline would have stretched over, and affected, three quarterly earnings reports.
Google experienced a similar shift following its IPO. Google started to phase out its Google Labs testing ground last July, around the same time it introduced Google+ to show investors it was dealing with the Facebook threat. And remember when Google used to brag that employees got 20% of their work time to do whatever they want? Boasts like that don’t fly with Wall Street investors.
“Simply becoming a multi-billion-dollar company changes the essence of its goals, activities and purpose,” Rushkoff said. “Its bloodstream becomes filled with cash, and cash has its own agenda.”
All That Said, You Need This To Work
The best case scenario is Facebook becomes one of those offerings in which what’s good for the customer is good for the shareholder, and ultimately good for anyone who uses social media.
Last year was marked by a string of disappointing IPOs in the social media sector – disappointments, in large part because those interests didn’t align as well as company executives had hoped.
People who bought deals from Groupon loved the service, but advertisers backed away when they realized it wasn’t generating the repeat business they had hoped for, and that made Wall Street weary. People love playing games on Zynga so much that they can’t be bothered to click onto ads and fuel the company’s revenue model. LinkedIn may have been the most successful IPO in 2011 in the social media space, but that was considered underwhelming – in large part because investors are still waiting to see if Facebook will eventually become an online space for social and business networking.
A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
International Reaction to Megaupload Indictment: This Means War
Jan 20th
A sizable chunk of Internet traffic went dark yesterday. No, I’m not talking about a SOPA protest. The #91 Web site on the entire Internet, Megaupload, was taken down after U.S. authorities executed a warrant to seize its Virginia-based servers and arrest four of its proprietors in New Zealand. To give you some perspective: On Google AdPlanner’s scale, Walmart.com is #97. Social document sharing service Scribd.com is #90. Huffington Post is #86.
To pretend it’s a revelation that Megaupload trafficked in illicit material is like Claude Rains being “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” That said, its “front parlor,” if you will, had many legitimate customers who had posted non-infringing files. So the big question that Colombia’s NTN24 news anchor Mónica Fonseca* asked me was essentially, “What has happened to everyone’s files?”
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Colombia
Earlier today, I appeared on NTN24′s “CST” program (Health, Science, Technology) to discuss the ramifications of the Justice Dept.’s seizure of Megaupload’s assets and domain names. In response to Fonseca’s question, I said that folks who had uploaded legitimate files to their “cyberlockers” won’t be able to access them today, and will probably find them gone anyway if and when some form of Megaupload comes back online from outside U.S. borders. My ReadWriteWeb colleague John Paul Titlow shares the same sentiments.
Has the United States started a war in cyberspace, I was asked? Certainly there’s no doubt of there being a war on, I responded, although there’s some doubt as to who really started it. In any event, it’s clear that the Justice Dept. has fired a huge salvo, and the battle is now raging.
What lessons should consumers take away from this turn of events? I told Fonseca that it doesn’t take very much due diligence for a conscientious consumer to spot the difference between a legitimate cloud storage service with the consumer’s interests at heart (I cited Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Box.com as examples) compared with one whose interests lie in goading him to partake in illicit file sharing. There’s a reason there are no independently-managed search services pointing to files on a site like Dropbox. It’s not out to make files popular; it’s out to provide customer service. When a service promotes itself as free, but continues to offer services behind a gilded, camouflaged door marked “premium” or “subscribers only,” consumers should get the hint.
New Zealand
Commenters believing yesterday’s indictment had been timed to coincide with recent White House events on anti-piracy, such as the Administration’s backing away from SOPA/PIPA, were proven wrong in an early Saturday, New Zealand time, report from the ONE News agency. It quotes a detective inspector with New Zealand’s counterpart to the FBI as saying it had conducted a joint investigation with the FBI since early 2011, which led eventually to yesterday’s arrests.
New Zealand-based political blogger David Farrar made this interesting observation: “Whether or not [Megaupload founder Kim] Dotcom and others have broken the law, will of course be a matter for the courts. It is worth noting that the NZ courts will not extradite unless the charges are for something that is also an offence under NZ law.”
Brazil
Some perspective: A report released today from broadband services provider Sandvine estimated Megaupload’s share of all traffic for file storage and backup purposes (which would include cloud storage providers) was less than 1% in the U.S., but 11.4% in Brazil. Its share of all traffic among fixed access networks (i.e., non-mobile) is about 1%, which is somewhat less than the 4% the site claimed in its own music video, but is still a substantial chunk.
A search of Megaupload-related traffic among Brazilian domain names (*.br) today turned up a greater-than-average number of Megaupload search sites – the independently-run, volunteer-maintained indexes referenced in the Justice Dept.’s indictment – plus quite a few Brazilian resellers of Megaupload premium plans. Although basic file sharing is among the features Megaupload typically provides for free, so-called “unlimited” plans, according to the DOJ indictment, enable customers to post suspiciously long media files and enter into rewards programs, giving them rebates when those files become popular. E-mails uncovered through DOJ raids, mentioned in the indictment, indicate that Megaupload’s proprietors were particularly interested in the popularity list, giving users advice as to how to rank more highly.
The nature of such advice would make Megaupload no longer eligible for the safe harbor protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, should the allegations prove true in court.
United Kingdom
At this time last year, U.K.-based search monitoring services provider Envisional made an estimate of the amount of total Internet traffic devoted to obviously (or, put another way, “shockingly”) infringing content. Envisional limited its analysis to non-pornographic content, for understandable reasons (its people probably couldn’t stomach the idea of wading through all that, and I don’t blame them). Non-pornographic content was estimated to consume 23.76% of all fixed access traffic.
Some 5.12% of all fixed access traffic was devoted, by the firm’s estimate, to infringing traffic directed to cyberlocker sites, the biggest of which was Megaupload.
In a debate article published earlier today by the U.K.’s Guardian, the political leader of that country’s Pirate Party, music teacher Loz Kaye (who is not an MP) debated IFPI Chief Executive Frances Moore.
Kaye argued that it’s not really viable to estimate the damage Megaupload may have caused to the movie, recording, and publishing industries based on lost revenue (the DOJ indictment estimated a half-billion dollars) since the business model of these industries are, in his opinion, antiquated and failing. He stated he believes Megaupload could essentially represent the new music industry that should supplant the old one, saying, “We all – pirates and artists – have an interest in a properly functioning and free Internet. Last year 70% of the total volume of British music sales were digital. The [British recording industry group] BPI would do well to remember that its future income is dependent on the very people it is currently antagonizing.”
To which Moore responded that the new music industry is represented more by iTunes and digital music stores, not glorified file sharing sites. “We’re licensing music widely to sites like iTunes, Spotify and Deezer,” Moore writes. “This growing digital music business is fantastic for artists and for consumers. Yet it can’t survive in a market rigged by illegal piracy. Events such as the U.S. Justice Department charging Megaupload are important developments – not just for the music industry, but for the whole creative economy.”
* Wait, wait a minute, did he say “Mónica Fonseca?” As in, the fashion model, the spokesmodel, the judge on the Latin American version of “Project Runway?” The girl on several relationship-ending posters and calendars all over South America? Yep. The same.
Now, perhaps it’s NTN24 policy and perhaps my wife called in to make a special request. But because I don’t speak Spanish, when I’m being interviewed by Mónica via Skype, I hear her questions via a translator. Today it was Andrew. And I don’t see Mónica asking the questions until after NTN24 makes the replay available online.
Still, if you’re wondering, she’s a very good interviewer and speaks well to her subject matter. Perhaps through the marvel that is technology, my wife and I will have the opportunity one day to speak more directly with Mónica and her husband, Colombian screen sensation, actor Juan Pablo Raba. (My wife has policies too.)
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What SoundCloud’s Massive New Funding Means
Jan 2nd
What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.
Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you’re not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It’s a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.
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With the funding, the esteemed analyst Mary Meeker (right), who is famous for making data-packed presentations each year about the state of the web, joins the company’s Board of Directors. Meeker left Morgan Stanley to join Kleiner-Perkins in November, 2010. She also sits on the Board of Directors at payments fireball Square.
Meeker’s 2011 presentation on the state of the internet addressed a trend of companies growing strong in one small market and then exploding out onto the global stage; she provided 4 examples of that trend and SoundCloud was the only one of the four not yet a Kleiner portfolio company. (Waze, Shazam and Spotify were the others.) Meeker also mentioned SoundCloud in discussing her belief that sound is going to be a next major area of innovation, eg. Siri, Spotify and SoundCloud.
Meeker loves mobile and while SoundCloud’s mobile apps are already good, it will be interesting to see whether and how her leadership inspires further development in global mobile applications.
What SoundCloud Means
SoundCloud is an inspiring community of audio producers and fans, leveraging new technology like widespread smart phones, cheap data storage and transfer, within a great user experience. It’s reminiscent of the best things about YouTube in its early days, but it’s different.
One good way to get started finding good things on SoundCloud is via the official staff collection of highlights from the site. That’s where I found the WildEarthVoices account, whose recordings and favorites from other accounts are all about ambient sound recordings from nature. SoundCloud has all kinds of sounds on it though; from podcasts to thunderstorms to electronic music, music made electronically and music you might call electronica. (There’s a lot of electronic music on SoundCloud.)
SoundCloud feels like the kind of creative place that the Internet was meant to be.
Like YouTube, SoundCloud hasn’t been without controversy either. Last February the company began sending take-down notices to remix artists who its algorithm alleged were using copyrighted materials and presumably without permission. Critics said it was a stab in the back to the remix artists that had helped SoundCloud grow so much in its early days. The site is definitely heavily used by electronic musicians.
Not all of SoundCloud’s experiments work out either, SoundCloudLabs was an effort to highlight cutting edge apps that seems to have lost steam over the past Summer.
None the less, the SoundCloud community appears to be small but growing fast. Traffic analyst firm Compete reports 2.3 million unique visitors per month, up nearly 2X year over year. SoundCloud self-reported 5 million registered users in June. It grew to 9 million as 2011 drew to a close. Pandora, for context, has 80 million registered users.
The company only added web and iOS one-click recording at the end of 2010. The acclaimed iPad app came out in October. The website still doesn’t offer RSS feeds of published files.
There’s something really exciting about checking the Activity stream on the SoundCloud iOS app and finding something new, then clicking through to listen with other people to music that was just posted.
SoundCloud was founded five years ago this month by CTO Eric Wahlforss, who has degrees in Philosophy, Industrial Economics, Computer Science and Business Administration and CEO Alexander Ljung, who studied marketing and Human Computer Interaction. Both are Swedish. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus did an in-depth interview with Ljung about the company’s prospects this October.
From inline commenting to smooth integration with 3rd party social networks, the user experience at SoundCloud is fun. Discovery can be a little challenging but exploration is easy. It would be nice if SoundCloud would sync with my Scrobbled musical history at Last.fm and offer me immediate personal recommendations.
The service hosts up to 120 minutes of audio for free, then offers annual subscriptions for more storage, advanced analytics and promotional materials priced at between €29 ($37) per year through €59 ($76) per month for the unlimited pro plus package.
The site offers a huge quantity of Creative Commons licensed audio and loves to interview the users of that and other content.
The SoundCloud API supports an app gallery with more than 250 apps listed and probably an even larger array of independent projects, from things like urban music catalogue CitySounds.fm to the collaborative mashup art project Instagrambient.
SoundCloud feels like the kind of creative place that the Internet was meant to be. For that to gain a big infusion of cash and the support of some of the world’s leading tech investors will hopefully mean more of the same and even better for the SoundCloud community.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What SoundClound’s Massive New Funding Means
Jan 2nd
What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.
Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you’re not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It’s a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.
Sponsor
With the funding, the esteemed analyst Mary Meeker (right), who is famous for making data-packed presentations each year about the state of the web, joins the company’s Board of Directors. Meeker left Morgan Stanley to join Kleiner-Perkins in November, 2010. She also sits on the Board of Directors at payments fireball Square.
Meeker’s 2011 presentation on the state of the internet adressed a trend of companies growing strong in one small market and then exploding out onto the global stage; she provided 4 examples of that trend and SoundCloud was the only one of the four not yet a Kleiner portfolio company. (Waze, Shazam and Spotify were the others.) Meeker also mentioned SoundCloud in discussing her belief that sound is going to be a next major area of innovation, eg. Siri, Spotify and SoundCloud.
Meeker loves mobile and while SoundCloud’s mobile apps are already good, it will be interesting to see whether and how her leadership inspires further development in global mobile applications.
What SoundCloud Means
SoundCloud is an inspiring community of audio producers and fans, leveraging new technology like widespread smart phones, cheap data storage and transfer, within a great user experience. It’s reminiscent of the best things about YouTube in its early days, but it’s different.
One good way to get started finding good things on SoundCloud is via the official staff collection of highlights from the site. That’s where I found the WildEarthVoices account, whose recordings and favorites from other accounts are all about ambient sound recordings from nature. SoundCloud has all kinds of sounds on it though; from podcasts to thunderstorms to electronic music, music made electronically and music you might call electronica. (There’s a lot of electronic music on SoundCloud.)
Like YouTube, SoundCloud hasn’t been without controversy either. Last February the company began sending take-down notices to remix artists who its algorithm alleged were using copyrighted materials and presumably without permission. Critics said it was a stab in the back to the remix artists that had helped SoundCloud grow so much in its early days. The site is definitely heavily used by electronic musicians.
Not all of SoundCloud’s experiments work out either, SoundCloudLabs was an effort to highlight cutting edge apps that seems to have lost steam over the past Summer.
None the less, the SoundCloud community appears to be small but growing fast. Traffic analyst firm Compete reports 2.3 million unique visitors per month, up nearly 2X year over year. SoundCloud self-reported 5 million registered users in June. It grew to 9 million as 2011 drew to a close. Pandora, for context, has 80 million registered users.
The company only added web and iOS one-click recording at the end of 2010. The acclaimed iPad app came out in October. The website still doesn’t offer RSS feeds of published files.
There’s something really exciting about checking the Activity stream on the SoundCloud iOS app and finding something new, then clicking through to listen with other people to music that was just posted.
SoundCloud was founded five years ago this month by CTO Eric Wahlforss, who has degrees in Philosophy, Industrial Economics, Computer Science and Business Administration and CEO Alexander Ljung, who studied marketing and Human Computer Interaction. Both are Swedish. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus did an in-depth interview with Ljung about the company’s prospects this October.
From inline commenting to smooth integration with 3rd party social networks, the user experience at SoundCloud is fun. Discovery can be a little challenging but exploration is easy. It would be nice if SoundCloud would sync with my Scrobbled musical history at Last.fm and offer me immediate personal recommendations.
The service hosts up to 120 minutes of audio for free, then offers annual subscriptions for more storage, advanced analytics and promotional materials priced at between €29 ($37) per year through €59 ($76) per month for the unlimited pro plus package.
The site offers a huge quantity of Creative Commons licensed audio and loves to interview the users of that and other content.
The SoundCloud API supports an app gallery with more than 250 apps listed and probably an even larger array of independent projects, from things like urban music catalogue CitySounds.fm to the collaborative mashup art project Instagrambient.
SoundCloud feels like the kind of creative place that the Internet was meant to be. For that to gain a big infusion of cash and the support of some of the world’s leading tech investors will hopefully mean more of the same and even better for the SoundCloud community.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What Amazon’s Merry Christmas Means for Tablets and the Future of Publishing
Dec 29th
Not unsurprisingly, this holiday season was a big one for the world’s biggest e-commerce retailer. But it wasn’t just all those remote-controlled, inflatable flying sharks and Forever Lazy pajamas people ordered. Among the biggest winners this year was Amazon’s line of Kindle e-readers and, naturally, the e-books that go on them.
Kindles flew off Amazon’s digital shelves at a rate of over 1 million per week during the month of December and occupied the top three slots on the company’s site-wide bestseller list. The #1 position was held by the Kindle Fire, which was also the most gifted and wished-for item on the entire site, according to data released today by Amazon.
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What good would all those new e-reader devices be without books to go with them? Sure enough, after unwrapping their new gadgets on Christmas Day, people took to the Kindle Store to download books, making it the single best day for ebook downloads since Amazon starting offering them. Between Black Friday and Christmas, Kindle books sold 175% more than they did during that same time period last year.
Indie Authors on the Rise
Found amidst the company’s holiday sales stats are a few clues about what the future of publishing might entail. In addition to obvious choices like Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, readers have been downloading books by independent authors at a growing pace.
In 2011, the first and fourth best-selling ebooks were by indie authors who published their work via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. No longer are readers limited to offerings from big publishing houses. Thanks to the explosion in e-books and the devices they’re best read on, unknown authors can become best-sellers like never before.
2012: Another Huge Year For Tablets
It was no mistake that Amazon released its media tablet just in time for the holiday season, and at less than half the cost of the iPad. The device is the fastest-growing tablet since the first generation iPad, and that growth shows no signs of stopping.
The early success of the Kindle Fire closes out another big year for tablets and precedes what is sure to be yet another one. Apple is expected to unveil the next generation of the iPad at some point in 2012, possibly in multiple sizes and almost certainly with a smaller price tag. Android is pushing its own platform forward with Ice Cream Sandwich and we’ll undoubtedly see a host of new ICS-friendly devices next year.
We’ll also see the launch of Windows 8 next year, a new generation of Microsoft’s operating system that will offer a seamless experience across dekstops, tablets and smartphones. How well it will catch on remains to be seen, but for Windows users, an affordable Windows 8-based tablet could be hard to resist.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google’s Autocomplete On-Deck and What It Means for Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Dec 15th
With the rise of Google and the power of Search, online reputation management (ORM) has become an extremely hot topic. Let’s face it, after hearing about a person, brand, company, or product, most people Google it. As a result, and as many of you know already, the number people (and companies) needing help with online [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Journal
Matt Cutts Explains What Google Means by “Trust”
Dec 9th
Ever wonder how Google’s “trust” works? Well Google’s Matt Cutts gives you some insight. This is not the whole story, but it does give you some great information you should keep in mind. Also, see related videos below. Some videos that are related: They don’t want us obsessed??? Really? Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
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View full post on Search Engine Journal
What The New YouTube Design Means For You – The Reel Web Episode 16 – ReelSEO Online Video News
Dec 6th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
What The New YouTube Design Means For You – The Reel Web Episode 16
ReelSEO Online Video News View All Posts By Tim Schmoyer Tim: There's always great info on REEL SEO, and I do enjoy the videos to some degree, but If I engage with a video about the new You Tube look, why is the first couple of minutes about Facebook? … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Guaranteed SEO Means Pay On Results SEO With Jenius Marketing – WebWire (press release)
Nov 28th
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Guaranteed SEO Means Pay On Results SEO With Jenius Marketing
WebWire (press release) November 28th, 2011 – Edinburgh, UK – The phrase guaranteed SEO gets used a lot in the SEO industry and Jenius Marketing (jeniusmarketing.co.uk) wants to clarify what their guaranteed SEO services really means. With Jenius Marketing guaranteed SEO, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
What Hollywood’s Experiments With Online Streaming Movies Means For The Future – ReelSEO Online Video News
Oct 10th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
What Hollywood's Experiments With Online Streaming Movies Means For The Future
ReelSEO Online Video News He is also founder of The Viral Orchard (http://www.viralorchard.com), an Internet marketing firm offering content writing and development services, viral marketing consulting, and SEO services. Jeremy writes constantly, loves online video, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
