Posts tagged Speculation
Speculation Abounds in Advance of Facebook Press Event
Jan 14th
Last week Facebook sent out an invitation to the press to “Come See What We Are Building.” The invitation gave no clues as to what the press would be coming to see only when and where to be to see it. The event is scheduled for tomorrow, and speculations have been running wild about what [...]
The post Speculation Abounds in Advance of Facebook Press Event appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Fear and Speculation Drove Facebook’s Instagram Buy
May 4th
Third in a five-part series.
Sometime in August, Facebook will top 1 billion users. Every few months, Twitter floats a press release that it has added another 100 million users. In quarterly earnings calls during the past year, Google has had to sheepishly admit that it its Google+ social network isn’t growing as fast as hoped. Pinterest is the hottest new social network, in large part because it reached 10 million users faster than any of its predecessors.
Building a social media empire is all about building numbers. Those numbers, however, don’t always have dollar signs in front of them.
“Fear + Speculation = Bubble.” – Dean M. Wright, founder of BrandMixer LLC.
“I do think there is a ton of speculation,” said Dean M. Wright, founder of the social data and research company BrandMixer LLC, noting last year’s Groupon initial public offering and this year’s likely Facebook IPO. “This speculation is driven largely by investors being enamored by the numerology of social media: Facebook has 850 million users! Over 50% of Tweets come from mobile and 300 million people in the U.S. have a mobile! Every minute there are 2,000 check-ins on Foursquare!”
But in an email, Wright says investors may want to consider one more equation in their calculations: “Fear + Speculation = Bubble.”
That fear, Wright said, prompted Facebook to spend $1 billion on Instagram, a company with no revenue and no discernible monetization strategy. What Facebook bought were the other numbers, the numbers that project Instagram hitting 100 million users by the end of the year.
“I think what we are seeing in the social media landscape today is fear more than speculation,” Wright said. “Fear of being replaced by the next new thing – not necessarily the next best thing.”
The “fear” half of the equation is tucked away on the left coast in Silicon Valley. But the “speculation” end of the equation will be largely driven 3,000 miles away, on Wall Street. Just how big the bubble gets will be determined by how much money investors spend in chasing hot IPOs.
“Having started my company in the shadow of the 1999 tech-bubble crash, I can definitely see parallels evolving between the ‘go-fever’ that pushed an industry over the cliff and what we are witnessing today,” said Mike Seiman, CEO of digital advertising company CPX Interactive. “The problem comes as a result of the combination of a fear of being left behind in the fast-paced evolving world of social models and the fear of a still anemic economy, which makes investors hot for a quick turn around on their investments.”
Seiman says he believes Facebook’s purchase of Instagram was impulsive, and that Facebook likely overpaid for the app maker. But, ultimately, Facebook feared it would not be able to show Wall Street investors that it had a mobile strategy based on its existing product, so that fear drove the company’s wild speculation.
Seiman, as we previously reported, does not necessarily think the acquisition is a fatal flaw.
“If Facebook has one advantage that could possibly make its own ‘go-fever’ a little less destructive, it is unique in its ability to bring unparalleled scalability to the table of its acquisitions,” Seiman said. “No one doubts that it likely overpaid for Instagram in what seems to be an impulsive move, but if anyone can use scale to elevate a potential contender into the next Facebook… perhaps it is Facebook.”
Next: Is Now The TIme To Launch Your Social Start-Up?
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Could Verizon Buy Netflix? Let The Speculation Begin – ReelSEO Online Video News
Dec 13th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Could Verizon Buy Netflix? Let The Speculation Begin
ReelSEO Online Video News This week's look at the Reel Web covers tips for YouTube SEO and several news stories from the… One of the top viewed pages on ReelSEO is that of a post that I put out with a resource list of… The following is an index of our more popular video … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
NFC News Round-up: RIM Fights Carriers; iPhone 5 Speculation Continues
Mar 18th
Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones, is in a battle with mobile operators over its plans to use NFC in its forthcoming devices. NFC, short for “near field communication,” is a technology that will enable mobile payments and mobile wallet-type applications, allowing customers to wave or tap their phones at point-of-sale to pay for purchases. According to a report from The Wall St. Journal today, the disagreement between RIM and the carriers has to do with where the credentials for these mobile payments will be stored – on a SIM card inserted into the phone, or, as RIM would have it, in a secure area within the BlackBerry device itself.
Meanwhile, in other NFC-related news, it appears that the iPhone 5 may have NFC capabilities after all, despite earlier reports saying plans for this had been scrapped.
Sponsor
For more on NFC, tune into our ongoing series, NFC in 2011. You can view earlier articles on that technology by clicking on the tag NFC 2011.
RIM vs. Carriers: Fighting for Control of the Mobile Wallet
There are several ways NFC can be implemented on a smartphone to enable mobile payments. It can be fully integrated into the handset, such as is the case with Google’s latest flagship phone, the Nexus S. It can exist on a removable microSD card which fits into slots on the phone, or can be inserted into accessories like cases or sleeves, such as is the case with Visa’s iPhone case for its In2Pay solution. Or it can be integrated into a SIM card – the card that identifies a mobile subscriber on an operator’s cellular network.
The method of implementation is what’s causing the rift between the carriers and RIM, according to the report from the WSJ today. Although the carriers expected to be cut out of the deal when Apple launched its NFC-enabled iPhone, RIM has traditionally been more carrier-friendly. For example, RIM did not preload its mobile app store on some of its devices so carriers could preload their own stores instead, reports WSJ.
The carriers say that putting NFC onto the SIM card is good for consumers because it doesn’t tie the users to one device – they can move their SIM card from phone to phone as they see fit. But obviously, having the technology present on the carrier-provided SIM would be good for the operators too, as it would allow them to be actively involved in the mobile payments system.
However, both RIM, and supposedly Apple, have plans to integrate the NFC technology into the phone itself, cutting the operators out of the deal. Now, the WSJ reports that the carriers are putting pressure on RIM, which is reaching out to banks on its own, to reconsider the way its choosing to implement NFC.
iPhone 5 to have NFC (Rumor)
In a related story, a new rumor is circulating today that contradicts an earlier report regarding NFC in the next iPhone release, the iPhone 5. On Monday, U.K.’s The Independent newspaper cited sources at several of the largest mobile operators in the U.K. as saying that Apple does not plan to implement NFC technology in the iPhone 5. Reportedly, Apple is concerned about the lack of an industry standard for the technology.
To us, that first report seemed misleading, not only because NFC has been an approved standard since 2003, but because the way the carriers are joining forces now to prepare their own NFC initiatives seems to imply some sort of immediate threat on the horizon. At last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 16 operators teamed up to announce their intentions to launch commercial NFC services. And in the U.S., three of the four top carriers have formed Isis, a mobile payments venture that will provide NFC-enabled credit, debit and prepaid accounts to users.
Today’s report from Forbes, while not as well-sourced at The Independent’s, simply feels more accurate. The source for the report is an Apple employee, who’s a friend of some unnamed entrepreneur, which puts this decidedly in “rumor” territory. Reportedly, Apple is working on a top-secret NFC project, the article claims.
Elsewhere, Cult of Mac claims to have more details. It says that Apple will use NFC in a system that will allow users to log into another computer using an NFC-equipped iPhone. The iPhone will pair with the host machine and load files and settings over the Internet.
While that would certainly be a neat trick, we find it hard to believe that’s the extent of Apple’s NFC plans. As everything moves to the cloud, the idea that iPhones have to physically pair with a computer in order to properly function becomes more and more passé, no matter how many new bells and whistles you introduce to make that process easier.
At the end of the day, the question is not whether Apple is working on an NFC-enabled iPhone, the question is how much of the NFC functionality, if any, will be available in iPhone 5 as opposed to the iPhone 6 and later devices. But NFC is coming to the iPhone, that much you can count on.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Speculation, Intrigue Surround Google’s Delayed Cloud-Tunes Music Service
Feb 1st
Google’s streaming-from-the-cloud-to-any-device music service was supposed to launch at the end of last year. Vic Gundotra demonstrated it at the 2010 Google developer conference. However music-rights and licensing issues have so far delayed it according to several reports. This, despite…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Schmidt on ‘False’ Media Speculation, Google vs. Facebook Obsession
Jan 27th
Speculation that Eric Schmidt was forced out as chief executive officer in favor of Larry Page due to internal conflicts surrounding China are “completely false,” Fortune reported. Schmidt also brushed off Facebook as a competitor and once again called Microsoft Google’s true competition at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
Yahoo CEO Bartz Announces Exec. Departures, Speculation About Bartz’s & Yahoo’s Future Begins
Sep 30th
Yahoo has seen a long list of talented people leave the company during the organizational turmoil of the past few years. However it appeared the company was stabilizing and potentially even back on track toward growth and forward momentum.
However AllThingsD earlier reported and today confirmed (before official confirmation from CEO Carol Bartz) that three top [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
