The Internet: Lack of Competition
Schachinger: A lack of competition tramples our privacy, is closing the open Internet; http://eicker.at/Competition
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Gerrit Eicker
The Facebook Decade
Facebook was the top-visited site in 2010; http://eicker.at/1y Goldman invests $500M, values them at $50B; http://eicker.at/1z
Gerrit Eicker
IT Transparency and Business Value
Gartner: IT organisations face disruptive change in 2011 due to transparency, need to drive business value; http://eicker.at/1v
Gerrit Eicker
Google Games?
Arrington: Google secretly invested $100+ million in Zynga, preparing to launch Google Games; http://j.mp/b6dg1c
Gerrit Eicker
Zynga Raised US$ 180M
Zynga, maker of FarmVille, Mafia Wars, raised US$ 180M from Russian venture capitalist DST; http://j.mp/8V7J7T
Gerrit Eicker
CIA Goes Social Media Monitoring
The CIA invests in social media monitoring service Visible Technologies via In-Q-Tel; http://j.mp/ztvce
Gerrit Eicker
Nokia Goes Virtual Worlds
Nokia Growth Partners (US $350M) will invest in startups innovating in virtual worlds beside others: http://j.mp/Tt6m2
Gerrit Eicker
Sprowtt
Via Sprowtt, anyone can participate in funding companies, similar to the traditional IPO process; http://j.mp/1ScYeX
Gerrit Eicker
Amazon’s Investments
MeetTheBoss has greatly visualised all investments of Amazon from 1998 until its purchase of Zappos; http://tr.im/uegr
Gerrit Eicker
Internet Companies: Like Utility Companies?
Interesting point of view: WSJ, The Internet Is Dead (As An Investment); http://tr.im/t7yh
Hitwise: “Facebook was the top-visited Website for the first time and accounted for 8.93 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google.com ranked second with 7.19 percent of visits, followed by Yahoo! Mail (3.52 percent), Yahoo! (3.30 percent) and YouTube (2.65 percent). … The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.”
TC: “Comscore also shows Facebook.com passing Google.com in visits in November but all Google sites as still having more.”
VB: “Beyond being good news from Facebook, the data seems like another sign that people are using search as their default way to navigate the Web, even when it might seem easier to just type in a URL. I would imagine that many of the people who do a search for ‘facebook.com’ probably know what Facebook’s URL is, but they typed it into a search engine (or into the search box at the top of their browser) instead.”
NYT: “Facebook, the popular social networking site, has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a deal that values the company at $50 billion, according to people involved in the transaction. … Goldman Sachs has reached out to its wealthy private clients, offering them a chance to invest in Facebook, the hot social networking giant that is considering a possible public offering in 2012, according to people familiar with the matter.”
RWW: “What’s most important isn’t the amount of literal control over the company that the banks bought, rather it’s the valuation this gives the company and the relationship the investment fosters between Goldman and Facebook. … Goldman’s investment in Facebook is going to be great for all the industries the company’s young leaders are likely to spend their money in, including tech startups. … Thank goodness for Google and Twitter. Without them, Facebook’s control over peoples’ identities online would be virtually unchallenged. The challenge those two companies pose isn’t very strong, either. Facebook is pushing fast to make itself the default login and identity system on sites all around the web. … More Facebook may mean better feature development for users in the short term, and it may mean more ubiquity for Facebook in the medium term, but in the long term it could mean trouble for the web in general.”
GigaOM: “It’s been over a decade since Time Warner and America Online merged in a $180-billion deal, marking the peak of the Internet bubble and the beginning of a long drought for technology stocks – a drought that has arguably been broken only by Apple and Google. Now Facebook seems to be taking the lead in the next wave of tech-stock enthusiasm… While the action for Facebook and others is focused in private and secondary markets right now, however, Goldman’s involvement virtually guarantees that this will soon spill out into the public markets – if not this year, then in 2012, when Facebook is expected to do an IPO.“