Everyone knows about Yahoo’s patent suit against Facebook. The conspiracy theory In the Silicon Valley ecosystem, Facebook has far more to lose than Yahoo! has to gain. Line up the two sides fighting this battle – Facebook is NATO while Yahoo! has Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Hence the conspiracy theory – Facebook has a $100 billion… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
In their paper – Cooperation, structure and hierarchy in multiadaptive games – Sungmin Lee, Petter Holme and Zhi-Xi Wu write: To epitomize, our work shows a generalization of spatial social dilemma models where hierarchies can emerge in a cooperative state. In our framework, these hierarchies need stable cooperating hubs to persist. In this sense, the… [Read more…]
January 10, 2011
Interesting analysis on TechCrunch yesterday – “Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?“ It wasn’t too long ago that the world feared global domination from Microsoft, followed by the red hot years of Google, and now all the talk is about Facebook’s $50 billion valuation. That’s the beauty of it all – market players with innovation… [Read more…]
January 4, 2011
Big news early in 2011 with Goldman Sachs raising and investing up to $1.5 billion in Facebook. To do so, Goldman is setting up a “Special Purpose Vehicle” (SPV). Because Facebook is a privately-held company, it can have no more than 499 individual investors due to SEC regulations. This SPV enables Goldman to make highly… [Read more…]
July 21, 2010
Interesting article on Wired today – 5 Things That Could Topple Facebook’s Empire. It’s fun and easy to create this lists – 5 things that…, 10 things that… – but thought-provoking nonetheless. Terms on a patent are 20 years, but businesses of the Facebook sort are difficult to make patentable, let alone enforce any legal… [Read more…]
August 11, 2009
I wish I was always this good… I guessed somewhere around $50 mln in an earlier post today about Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed. Turns out I was pretty close according to this post in the WSJOnline late today. So it didn’t take linear algebra to make the guess, but what the heck…
August 10, 2009
Just saw that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. Found this interesting since the Google tree is expanding. Paul Buchheit is one of FriendFeed’s founders and the brains behind Gmail. After watching him speak on a panel last Spring, I wrote about Google, employee retention, and entrepreneurship. FriendFeed is a small shop with only 12 employees according… [Read more…]
February 18, 2009
Logged into my Facebook account this morning to see: Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For… [Read more…]
November 26, 2008
Following up with an additional thought on the Twitter/Facebook saga… In yesterday’s article, I approached Twitter’s valuation from a “per twitterer” basis – arriving at an estimated value of $45 per twitterer based on Facebook’s $500 million which is really worth $150 million using the “Henry Blodget Facebook valuation discount factor.” To put the $45… [Read more…]
November 26, 2008
Maybe the message was something like: Twitter: @Facebook “No can do. Thx 4 the offer.” It’s common knowledge now that Twitter declined Facebook’s “$500 million” offer. Running some numbers yields some interesting results on the offer and valuations of both companies. (We’ll come back to the quotes around the $500 million shortly…) Back in April,… [Read more…]
Click here for more stuff about me...
March 25, 2012
0