Facebook IPO Promise And The Brain Gain That Brings

You can always expect Mike Arrington to write a snarky little blog post like this one.

TechCrunch: Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook: Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees..... Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party

I think Facebook is waiting for the recession to truly be over before it goes for an IPO. Otherwise it is ready. It has been ready for an IPO for a while.

The IPO gold rush can be heady stuff. There is at least one obvious, big billionaire waiting in the wings, one they made a movie about. But Facebook is big enough that there will be a whole new crowd of super rich people.

And to think I once proposed a rapid fire Twitter IPO to end the recession. (Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO)

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

TechCrunch

Google Making Extraordinary Counteroffers To Stop Flow Of Employees To Facebook
Gmail’s Permanent Failure: Only Humans Can Build Software For Humans
Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian To Join Y Combinator
Apple Announces The New iPod Touch: Dual Cameras, Retina Screen

Dead Web?

I have been reading this phrase for a while now, the web is dead. I have not bothered to click so far. That phrase makes no sense. The web will never be dead, like never, never, never. But the phrase seems to be making the rounds just like the women in tech meme, and I just came across a post by Al Wenger on the topic off my blogroll. I decided to click on it to see what all the fuss was about.

Al Wenger: Another Take on the Web Is Dead: Limits to Decentralization: Much has been made of the potential shift of attention from the totally open web to more proprietary platforms on mobile devices...... Almost all the knowledge that is on Wikipedia also exists on the web at large distributed across millions of sites.....Small merchants could set up their own web sites rather easily these days and sell directly. So what is it that Amazon adds?

The iPhone revolution has create new space, and that news space has added to the ecosystem of information consumption, but that new space is nowhere even remotely close to taking over the old, wide web. China has not overtaken America. Chill, people.

Amazon and Wikipedia are not examples of a closed web. They are two flagships instead that the open web boasts of.

iPhone apps are fine but so is table tennis as a game. Does not beat soccer, though. (World Cup: Spain Deserved To Win)



Marc Andreessen: Good Ambition, Bad Ambition
Ben Horowitz: The Right Kind Of Ambition

Brad Burnham: Internet Architecture And Innovation: the architecture of the internet is changing - that the economic interests of the internet access providers are not the same as the interests of the applications developers or end users, that there is not enough competition in the local loop to provide market discipline, so without intervention, innovation on the Internet will suffer. .... protecting the original design principles of the Internet is the most efficient regulatory regime

Mark Cuban Says Put Your Cash Under The Mattress

This has got to be one of the best Mark Cuban blog posts I ever came across. For a risk taking maven to put together such sane advice, we must really be going through some tough times as a people.

Mark Cuban: The Best Investment Advice You Will Ever Get

I Share Mark Cuban's Passion On The FCC Broadband Plan
Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

Here's my summary of his three points.

1. Credit cards are no good. Pay them off. 
2. When in doubt, stick with the cash, don't invest.
3. Spending 15% less is a better return than any on the stock market.