Indeed.Taboo wrote:Yup. Goldman Sachs and their friends are doing their musical chairs dance again:
http://blogs.wsj.com/overheard/2012/05/ ... -facebook/
Accel Partners plans to sell up to 28% of its shares.
Peter Thiel plans to sell as much as 50% of his stake.
Goldman Sachs will also sell as much as 50%, up from 23% previously.
DST Global and Mail.ru will dump up to 40% of their shares, up from 23% previously.
Tiger Global will sell up to 50% of its stake. Previously it planned to sell 7%.
They will all be laughing all the way to the bank at the suckers to buy them out.
Typhoon wrote:Looks like there are a number of people wondering what exactly does Facebook do?
Why I Lost My Faith In Facebook Advertising
A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
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A lot of these people got burned. Academics at the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida recently compiled a list of about 250 companies that doubled — at least — in price on their first trading day. Many quickly fell back to earth.
Going back to 1975, the list provides some of the greatest hits in I.P.O. land. The top 10 first-day gainers all went public in the Internet boom. They included VA Linux, which rose almost 700 percent, to a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, and The Globe.com, which produced a gain of 606 percent on its first day as a public company. Foundry Networks and WebMethods soared more than 500 percent.
Some of the companies on the list have disappeared or have been acquired. Others are still around, to lesser and greater degrees. TheGlobe.com trades at less than a penny a share. VA Linux is now called Geeknet and, as of Friday, had a market value of $94 million.
Why did Facebook get a relatively slow start out of the trading gate? One possibility is that the investment bankers who priced the stock considered the history of private trading in the shares before the offering. Facebook was unusual in this way, Laszlo Birinyi of Birinyi Associates pointed out last week.
“There was trading before the I.P.O., so many investors have some feel, some idea of pricing,” he noted. Most offerings are priced based upon what the company and its bankers guess the stock will fetch.
Indications are that Facebook was bought primarily by individual investors, not institutions. Indeed, institutions that had invested early were big sellers in the I.P.O. To many market veterans, this showed that the smart money was getting out while the getting was good.
With investors still believing the advice of Peter Lynch, the former Fidelity fund manager who told individuals to buy stocks of companies they knew as consumers, it is easy to see why Facebook’s offering resonated with the public. But now comes the hard part: operating as a company that returns its investors’ favors with actual earnings.
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"Never give a sucker an even break." W.C. FieldsTyphoon wrote: The best part is that it's being done without having to fire a single shot as it is both legal and voluntary.
Aural Sects?Simple Minded wrote:"Never give a sucker an even break." W.C. FieldsTyphoon wrote: The best part is that it's being done without having to fire a single shot as it is both legal and voluntary.
Modern tech has been a boon to the snake oil industry.
If I was Z, I would have named the company either InterFace or Oral Sex.....
If those were taken I might have to settle for Face Sex.... Inter Sex.... No Space... Space Sex.....
For Facebook, it's spectacular. But Silicon Valley is screwed as we know it.
If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick? If you're a VC firm, you're tossing out your life science division. All of that stuff is hard and the returns take forever. Look at social media. It's not hard, because of the two forces I just described, and the returns are quick.
I teach science and engineering. I see my students trying to commercialize really hard stuff. But the VCs are only going to be interested in chasing the billions on their smart phones. Thank God we have small business research grants from the federal government, otherwise the Chinese would just grab them.
The headline for me here is that Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we're dancing on its grave. On the other hand, Facebook is a great company. I feel bittersweet.
What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?
By Spengler
"What if Internet stocks aren't a bubble?" [1] was the title of my inaugural essay in January 2000, with the observation that an economy based on downloading pop music and porn was a possible future state of the world. "Re-ordering the priorities of the world economy around the vices of affluent people is nothing new," I observed. "We went through all of this before in the 17th century."
Facebook's initial public offering May 18 with a $100 billion valuation, to be sure, is not quite as whimsical as the Internet stocks of a dozen years ago, which had losses rather than earnings. Facebook does earn $1 billion a year. Total US advertising expenditures last year were $144 billion according to Kantar Media, and global ad spending was nearly $500 billion. Facebook users provide data which the firm can process in order to target ads to the right recipients, so that the website stands to gain market share, or so the story goes.
It's Big Brother running the Matrix on Madison Avenue. Supercomputers with artificial intelligence programs will sift our communications for clues as to our commercial proclivities. Auto companies will know when to pitch SUV's rather than electric vehicles, and purveyors of timeshares in St Helena or shrunken heads will identify the eight dozen individuals in the world most inclined to buy their products. Advertisers will replace expensive broadcast advertising with targeted Internet ads that follow Facebook users from their home page to their favorite websites.
That's something I actually agree with, and yes, the ability to cultivate a "store-front window self" is probably one of the main reasons that the virtual world feels so comparatively shallow and fake.We learn about people by playing sports with them, or drinking with them, or praying with them, cramming for final exams with them, working with them, or marching alongside them in the military - from situations, that it is, which cannot easily be controlled and which elicit spontaneous responses for better or worse.
I think Facebook is hilariously overvalued. I just find any extrapolations about the larger social media/tech trend to also be overly sage.Taboo wrote:Wait, so you think that Facebook is not hilarously overvalued?
I never really understood this point of view. The Social media 'storefront' has a 'store' behind it. And the real relationships happen there. I mean, I'm working on a Congressional campaign and its largely coordinated via Social Media. I am building up a pretty vast political network of people with varying degrees of political influence in the sphere that I am targetting. I make relationships with those people in person, face to face, I touch them, dance with them, undercut their elections in political offices, get them elected to political offices, appear in photos with them, carry petitions with them, sit in the lawyers office with them, march through the streets with them, make phone calls on their behalf, have phone calls made on my behalf, take long road trips, and yes...laugh at lolcats with them.Taboo wrote:That's something I actually agree with, and yes, the ability to cultivate a "store-front window self" is probably one of the main reasons that the virtual world feels so comparatively shallow and fake.We learn about people by playing sports with them, or drinking with them, or praying with them, cramming for final exams with them, working with them, or marching alongside them in the military - from situations, that it is, which cannot easily be controlled and which elicit spontaneous responses for better or worse.
I probably have about two dozen people who I feel a really deep and intimate bond with. But I would say that my shallow relationships are probably deeper because of a lot of the things that people claim are making relationships more shallow, i.e. online interaction, raves, etc...Taboo wrote:Ok, Enki, that's pretty reasonable. I agree.
I was thinking about the idea of Facebook profiles. I was thinking that instead of knowing 20 people well and 200 vaguely, you get to know 10 well, and 1000 (or 10,000) vaguely if at all. I mean, it's nice to hear that so-and-so is getting married, see the babypics, but do i know them? To know them, you have to write letters (electronic or not), and share and give and receive. The time you dedicate building shallow relationships you cannot dedicate to building deeper ones, no? Does not mean that there are no deep ones, merely fewer, or less deep than they would get to be otherwise. I'm not married to this viewpoint, but it makes sense to me.
Doesn't mean it will always be Facebook.Yukon Cornelius wrote:Guys, Facebook will always be with us -- teens will always need someplace to preen and pose, and there will always be adults for whom High School never really ended.
No, I think that's right -- I keep expecting the whole thing iterate to the next social networking thingy.Enki wrote:Doesn't mean it will always be Facebook.Yukon Cornelius wrote:Guys, Facebook will always be with us -- teens will always need someplace to preen and pose, and there will always be adults for whom High School never really ended.
