Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business

Interesting quote:

"[Facebook and Twitter] are both verbs now, and that is a very strong indicator of how deeply they have penetrated consumer behavior," Liew said via email. "If their current capital is not sufficient to last them, they will be able to raise money (at some valuation -- perhaps not an 'up' round) because they are clearly generating value."

Facebook is generating revenues so I can agree the value statement, but not so much for Twitter. It has 6 million prospects and hasn’t monetized one of them yet. If it can, well then it has value, until it is just another free utility and represents the potential for value. That would be the difference between a prospect (someone who hasn’t paid you a thing yet) vs. a customer who has paid you something.

The next metric to figure out is “sustainable, measureable, profitable revenue from volume”… that neither Facebook or Twitter has (yet).

MediaShift . Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business | PBS

Don't ever use Google Apps for anything important

Caveat Emptor rules the day once again. A warning to others, “pie is never free at the truck stop” and good pie (i.e. something with real phone support (sorry about switch metaphors but you need to read the article)) is never cheap.

I nearly signed up for this sometime back but then changed my mind. Glad I did.

The Business of Software - Don't ever use Google Apps for anything important

4 numbers – 819, 647, 11 & 0

$89 billion stimulus

647 pages in the bill (approx)

11 Democrats who didn’t vote for it

0 Republicans who voted for it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Can you imagine writing a 616 page business plan in 45 days with $818 billion in spending in it and think that it’s anywhere close to being the right thing?

What also amazes me is that literally not a single Republican voted for the bill and even 11 Democrats jumped ship. I’m sure this thing will get passed in the Senate next week, but you just have to stop and think for a moment if this is just a rush to do something without seriously thinking things through.

People in congress are smart but not that smart to deliver something that has any hope of really working.

Well Mr. Obama the clock is now ticking on your Presidency. 2 years from now we all get to see if the Democrats have really figured it out. If they have you’ll get 4 more years, if not – we’ll we’re going to get a change, just not the one you hoped for.

Sums things up nicely – business as usual in Washington

My favorite part is where he talks about the need to pay people $100m dollar bonuses otherwise they will leave. No one is worth a $100m – you could hire an army of people for that amount. One more indication of the disconnect in Washington.

Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists

Interesting blog on the state of the VC industry. Something has to change primarily due to the lack of an IPO exit strategy. This means that startup’s really have to build a business with measureable, sustainable profitable revenue from volume.

Anything less, especially one that consumes more than $10m (for infrastructure) or $25m (for a web service) is not going to make it profitable for the VC’s.

Contrary to what you hear for VC’s it’s still about the exit and the only two things that really count for them is what they paid for the stock and what they sold it for. All the rest is up to the entrepeneur.

Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Microsoft aiming to recover lost ground in mobile

 

He noted that the power of the kinds of phones that come out next year will be incredible, well beyond even today's devices. Phones next year will have dual-core processors, super-fast data connections, and graphics power rivaling that of the original Xbox.

"That's a phenomenal thing on a phone," he said. The phones of the future will also have location information beyond just GPS sensors. "It will know where it is pointing, it will know which angle it is being held at."

The phone becomes a tricorder and what comes next is tying those new features directly into Web services

Microsoft aiming to recover lost ground in mobile - CNN.com

A Tale of Two Companies

This is a must read post – McDonalds got it right and Starbucks didn’t. Starbucks has lost $21b in market cap and has negative cash flow. McDonalds is profitable.

What’s the delta between these two companies? One focused on delivering value to the customer and the other totally forgot about value and focused on valuation.

Oops!

A Tale of Two Companies | Venture Chronicles

My Windows 7 Task Bar

20 applications running simultaneously – including VMware with XP. It’s barely breaking a sweat.

Windows 7

Well I couldn’t stand it any longer. My laptop is running W7 and is so fast and stable that I thought I’d put it on my desktop PC. I had two issues:

1. Mouse – wouldn’t scroll correctly. Solution was to uninstall the software I was using.
2. Windows Mobility Center. Solution was to uninstall what was there and then attach the Mobile device

That’s it. And one other item of note. If you disable the UAC controls then your gadgets disappear. Solution is to set the UAC at the first level and then they reappear.

Apart from that Windows 7 is faster and more stable (on my PC’s) than Vista SP1.

Finally we have a desktop OS that really kicks ass on the PC. And if you love your Mac then you can run them in parallel either via dual boot or using VMware or Parallels.

They’re NOT Customers!

 TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter has raised more funds, this time with a $250 million valuation. That means that if you are one of the six million people on Twitter that you’re worth $42.

Sounds about right. I remember Kraft food executives telling me they spend about $40 to acquire customers (er, advertise).

A customer is someone who PAYs you something for goods or a service. What Twitter has is 6 million prospects who pay NOTHING.

Taking the Freemium approach they will (maybe) convert 1% of that number. So what Twitter actually has is about 60,000 actual prospects they can turn into money.

But hey, a $250m valuation in this economy is something to be proud of? Maybe not, all depends on what the number of shares outstanding is and what the latest investor paid for them. They might need an exit of $500m or more to make money and there’s only one or two companies who could afford to pay that for essentially 60,000 real prospects.

How not to land a plane

Let Freedom Ring

Welcome to the 44th President – now starts a new chapter and one that is sorely needed – one of hope and one of unity.

Flight 1549

How often do you see this?

What’s remarkable is that the entire fuselage is intact (and everybody lived).

Very few pilots are good enough to pull off this kind event.

Fundamentals

"We are going through some tougher times, how do you see this playing out?" Guy, a champion for entrepreneurs replied, "Well, I’m not a visionary or an oracle, I’ll tell you what I would tell an entrepreneur, which is, ‘plug your ears and keep going!’ Of all the tech startups one out of 5000 go public so what difference does it make what the DOW Jones Industrial Average, especially tomorrows DJIA, maybe 5 years from now it’ll matter, but not tomorrow. If you just try to build a great business, hopefully that great business will make a ton of money.

If you make a ton of money, maybe you’ll go public – still unlikely, but you might; and you might get acquired, also unlikely but we go from one out of 5000 to one out 500, something like that, so that helps. But even if none of those sort of dream things happen, you have a good business! If you only start businesses in good times, you may have to wait a few years – I really don’t see why it truly matters.

You either believe or you don’t believe. If you’re an entrepreneur who says, ‘well, I’m not going to start a company because the stock market is too low and unemployment is too high’, I’ve got to tell you I would put those two items right at the bottom. You have to develop a good product, you have to make it, you have to sell it, collect the money and service your customers, pretty much the fundamentals."

Just do the fundamentals and you’ll be ok.

Meet Lady Subprime

This article sums it all up. Greed, Greed and more Greed – and then along come the ratings agency's who would rate a cow if they were asked and packed this deal as Triple A.

And we all think Bernie is the only crook out there. Methinks we doth protest too much.  

Richard Cohen - Meet Lady Subprime - washingtonpost.com

iTunes Plus: Everything you need to know

Be warned: your account information is stored in every file
Although iTunes Plus files feature no copy protection, files downloaded still contain the email address you have registered with iTunes. So although files can physically be shared with, and played by, friends and family, any of your purchases that end up on file-sharing networks, for example, can be traced back to you.

Thanks for this little gem. There goes your privacy.

iTunes Plus: Everything you need to know - Crave at CNET UK

What the only two things that matter to a VC?

1. What price did they buy the stock at?
2. What price did they sell the stock at?

All the rest is, well just talk. VC’s make money by taking a risk on a company and then getting paid when they divest themselves of that risk. The difference is what separates the winners and losers.

The goal of every entrepreneur (building a for profit company) should be to get to measurable, sustainable, profitable revenue from volume. If you can do this AND keep the number of shares outstanding in your company to less than 8 million then you stand a reasonable chance of rewarding the original investors.

If you don’t i.e. you take a ton of money from VC’s then you’d better hope that you can build a sustaining company otherwise you’ll be heading for the slaughter house (remember, pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered. Don’t be a hog!)

Windows 7

Thoughts so far:

• It’s a faster Vista
• It has pleasant surprises
• It uses less resources than Vista

and the biggest one of all – it just works. This is going to be a big seller for Microsoft.

How to start a presentation

Now this totally works for me. The energy, the irrational exuberance, you can tell he loves his company. This is what every entrepreneur should be like with their startup.

 

Perfect - is "simplicity devoid of unnecessary elements

This poem is perfection:

 

'WINTER'

a poem by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

SHIT, It's Cold !

The End

Satyam Chief Admits Huge Accounting Fraud

Welcome my friends to the show that never ends… and the best part of this scam is (drum roll)

Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank loans the company listed in assets for its second quarter, which ended in September, were nonexistent.

So I have a question… how do you make up $1.04 billion and say it’s in the checking account?

Who else knew about this?

Simply staggering that this kind of egregious behavior goes on. The only good news is that with the current economic issues, more of these things will be discovered. Only when they are can we start to have faith and trust in the people who run these companies. Until then, buyer beware!

Satyam Chief Admits Huge Accounting Fraud - NYTimes.com

In Silicon Valley, Venture Capitalists Turn Cautious

Two things of interest…

“Pure mobile content is overinvested, but hardware is under hyped,” said David Weiden, a partner at Khosla Ventures. Revenue from the iPhone and BlackBerry exceeds that of the entire mobile content market, he said.

Not a good time to be in mobile content. (whatever that is – there’s only content, no need to subdivide it any further)

&

“Cisco was founded two weeks before a stock market crash. Oracle was founded during the Reagan recession,”  Mr. Holland said. “In bad times, that’s when the best opportunities come up.”

It’s the only time when things get back to normal and you don’t have to compete with ideas that clearly have no sustainable value.

In Silicon Valley, Venture Capitalists Turn Cautious - NYTimes.com

Why SaaS is a big deal and why Mobile SaaS will be even bigger

SaaS is not ASP. SaaS is Net Native software, built to run on the Net. What worries the heck out of the big vendors is that this new code costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost that their mammoth old code bases cost.

It’s all about "COST”. Shrink the cost, shrink the integration time, leverage standards and before long the Enterprise has to react.

Google needs You to Help

 

Only one tiny, tiny little problem – who owns the idea. Oops my bad :) just gave someone with billions in cash a great idea. All that’s missing is execution.

Perfection

 Perfection should have an element of chaos to be absolute ... but at the same time ... perfection is "simplicity devoid of unnecessary elements"...

How incredibly elegant.

Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web? – Only if it goes across ALL mobile platforms

Interesting idea – our company actually makes it possible to do this. It’s very simple – write an applet that talks to the device API’s (application programming interface) – aggregate that data and then pass it to the web server by adding it to the browsers request headers (which get sent when you request a web page). That’s it. Very simple, uses all existing standards and works with everything connected to the web. One more thing the author below misses – Privacy. However that’s also easy to deal with, ensure that the user retains control over his or her data contained within the applet. Now you’re done.

A mobile phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and processing. But it's time we realized that the local compute power is a fraction of what's available in the cloud. Web applications take this for granted -- for example, when we request a map tile for our phone -- but it's surprising how many native applications settle themselves comfortably in their silos. (Consider my long-ago complaint that the phone address book cries out to be a connected application powered by my phone company's call-history database, annotated by data harvested from my online social networking applications as well as other online sources.)

Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

Extraordinary numbers

From the NYT

My favorite - -0.016% on the 3 month T-Bill. Think about that for a moment, Owning T-Bills actually cost you money!

Why VC’s will keep investing – and Happy New Year

It’s all about creating value from nothing.

Venture capital, and the entrepreneurs who fuel it with their ideas and hard work, make money going from nothing to something.

Sure IRR’s are coming down, however they will only go away if the VC’s stop investing. The key now is to find something that can go from nothing to something worth 10’s of millions. That’s real value and can be captured as long as the VC’s still show up to the party.

If not, then the VC’s will cease to survive.