Simon Black,  May 18, 2012, business Insider

 

 

When you think about it, it’s easy to understand why financial markets and media have been so fixated on the Facebook IPO.

The creation of so many billionaires and millionaires overnight is certainly cause for good cheer, and given the debacle in Europe coupled with America’s looming ‘fiscal cliff’, Facebook may be the ONLY bit of good news in the entire financial system.

But a $100 billion valuation…? 100+ times earnings? This certainly seems excessive, at least for now.

What we’re supposed to believe about Facebook is that the company is going to continue to revolutionize advertising in the way that it stratifies users by demographic, geography, interests, etc.

But there are a few issues with Facebook’s model-

1) Ad space is limited.

Like real estate along the highway for billboards, there is only so much digital real estate on a user’s screen that can be allocated for advertising space.

Once Facebook sells this space, it’s gone and cannot be resold. In order for Facebook to sell more ad space, the user needs to refresh his/her screen by clicking on a link.

Each time this happens, there is new screen real estate available for ad space, and Facebook can generate more revenue. READ.....

 

 

By IND Web Design

By Mark Hachman,  May 3, 2012,  PC Magazine

Facebook said Thursday that it set the price for its public offering at between $28 and $35 per share, which will raise up to $13.6 billion for the company's coffers.

Facebook will sell 337.4 million shares, according to the filing, sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. In total, 337,415,352 shares will be offered, of which 180 million shares will be offered by Facebook directly, from which the company will receive proceeds.

While the shares will undoubtedly be one of the hottest investments on Wall Street in a few weeks, they will, as noted earlier, not be a means for private equity to exercise and control over the company. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will either directly hold or control the voting power attached to 57.3 percent of the company's voting stock, the documents say.

Reports have previously indicated that the date of Facebook's IPO will be May 18, and that Facebook will begin its "roadshow," or its presentations to investors, on this coming Monday. The roadshow will feature chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg as well as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, although Sandberg and chief financial officer David Ebersman will do the bulk of the presentations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

By law, Facebook has already disclosed its most pertinent information inside of its S-1 filing, most recently with its first quarter earnings. Facebook disclosed then that it has over 900 million users, reporting profits of $203 million on revenue of $1.06 billion for the first quarter. The company's daily active users, meanwhile, increased to 526 million, up 41.4 percent. READ......

By IND Web Design

By Michelle Maltais, Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2012

As more people look to the cloud for digital storage, such as the recently unveiled Google Drive, the era of being able to mindlessly click "OK" or "Agree" may be over.

When your stuff is stored on your computer at home, you alone are responsible for keeping it safe, secure and backed up. Your roof, your rules. But when you shift from local storage to remote, you live by terms set by someone else — and it's best to read them.

This is true for any cloud service, not just Google's.

First, there are two sets of word-dense documents you need to read before marrying yourself to a cloud-service: the privacy policy and the terms of service. Yes, the words will bleed together from all the legal jargon, but they're important.

Unlike banks, however, there is no insurance for the security — and replacement — of our digital stuff. Although nearly every provider's terms read differently, one thing remains the same. They all tell you explicitly they are not responsible for any loss you experience.

So before jumping on the cloud bandwagon, you might want to figure out how to back yourself up if your stuff should dissipate like an actual cloud in the sky.  READ....

By IND Web Design

by Ruchir Sharma, April 16, 2012, The Atlantic

 

 

As playwright Arthur Miller once observed, "An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." Most of the illusions that defined the last decade -- the notion that global growth had moved to a permanently higher plane, the hope that the Fed (or any central bank) could iron out the highs and lows of the business cycle -- are indeed spent. Yet one idea still has the power to capture the imagination of the markets: that the inexorable rise of china and other big developing economies will continue to drive a "commodity supercycle," a prolonged upward rise in the prices of commodities ranging from oil to copper and silver, to textiles, to corn and soybeans. This conviction is the main reason for the optimism about the prospects of the many countries that live off commodity exports, from Brazil to Argentina, and Australia to Canada.

I call this illusion commodity.com, for it is strikingly similar in some ways to the mania for technology stocks that gripped the world in the late 1990s. At the height of the dotcom era, tech stocks comprised 30 percent of all the money invested in global markets. When the bubble finally burst, commodity stocks -- energy and materials -- rose to replace tech stocks as the investment of choice, and by early 2011 they accounted for 30 percent of the global stock markets. No bubble is a good bubble, and all leave some level of misery in their wakes. But the commodity.com era has had a larger and more negative impact on the global economy than the tech boom did.

Tech CEOs became rock stars because they promised a life of rising productivity, falling prices, and high salaries for generating ideas in the hip office pods of the knowledge economy, or for trading tech stocks from a laptop in the living room. It was impossible in those days to get investors interested in anything that did not involve technology and the United States, so some of us started talking up emerging markets as "e-merging markets," while analysts spent a lot of time searching for the new Silicon Valley, which they dutifully but often implausibly discovered hiding in loft offices everywhere from Prague to Kuala Lumpur. READ....

 

By IND Web Design

By NICOLE PERLROTH,  April 7, 2012, New York Times

Text message spam has started waking Bob Dunnell in the middle of the night, promising cheap mortgages, credit cards and drugs. Some messages offer gift cards to, say, Walmart, if he clicks on a Web site and enters his Social Security number.

Once the scourge of e-mail providers and the Postal Service, spammers have infiltrated the last refuge of spam-free communication: cellphones. In the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.

Spread over 250 million text message-enabled phones, the problem is not as commonplace as e-mail spam. But it is a growing menace, with the potential for significant damage.

“Unsolicited text messaging is a pervasive problem,” said Christine Todaro, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, the consumer watchdog agency, which is turning to the courts for help. “It is becoming very difficult to track down who is sending the spam. We encourage consumers to file complaints, which helps us track down the spammers, but even then it is a little bit like peeling back an onion.” READ....

 

 

By IND Web Design

By Ricardo Lopez, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2012

 

The economic downturn was tough on the urban core of many U.S. cities. But Pomona got a booster shot from an unlikely source: Western University of Health Sciences.

The institution constructed a new clinic and a classroom building as part of a $110-million expansion. The school had previously rehabilitated existing retail space in Pomona's once-blighted center. Its Health Professions Center, for example, is a renovated former Buffum's department store. Nearby, a building that once held a JCPenney houses the University Research Center.

The changes have helped entice developers to construct residential lofts downtown. New businesses are sprouting. There's even a bi-monthly art walk.

"It's humming down there," said Frank Garcia, executive director of the Pomona Chamber of Commerce. "Things are starting to come alive. Restaurants are coming back." READ....

 

By IND Web Design