Netizen

Monday, July 02, 2012

Declaration of Internet Freedom

Sunday, July 01, 2012

The Big Data Landscape

Source: Forbes

Search --> Social --> Mobile --> Big Data

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Google won search. Facebook won social. Android is going to win mobile. Who will win Big Data? Is Big Data the next big thing on par with search, social and mobile? I take it for granted it is. In fact, I take that already to be the industry wisdom.

Fred Wilson: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is: In technology the more things change, the more they stay the same. You cannot ever rest. Because the big change that is going to upset your nice apple cart is right around the corner. Today that is mobile. Tomorrow, who knows? I am trying like hell to figure out what that will be and jump on it. Because that's how you play this game.

Considering Google+ has tremendous momentum. And Google is already hard at work on Big Data, Google as a company ends up looking really, really good.

I have long been a Google fanboy, like people are Apple fanboys.

Netizen Has Arrived: A Link From AVC

Friday, June 29, 2012

Fully Filling Out My LinkedIn Profile

Image representing LinkedIn as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

I signed up for LinkedIn not long after it was launched because I read about it in the news. But I have never been much of a user. Two days back I decided to add many more details. For the first time I might have a full profile. Although it has technically been full the entire time.

Chris Dixon once said people thought he had a "strange" resume. I might have one of those. Omitting details makes it stranger. So I decided to add details going back as far as I could.

My LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has been defying gravity as a post IPO company. Good old fashioned revenue helps. Their revenues have doubled every quarter since they went IPO. And that is why they still have an outlandish P/E ratio. At LinkedIn corporate salespeople are considered as important as engineers. Most of their money comes from charging big money to recruiters. LinkedIn is recruiting on steroids.

While you are at it, go read this article.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Why Is The Google Phone Expensive?

Image via CrunchBase

Google is about to hit the tablet market with something priced around $200. That'd be an explicit competition with Amazon, not Apple, but you get the point.

I have always been surprised as to why the best Android phones were the same price as the iPhone. The Android operating system is free, the iPhone operating system is not free. So why are not the Android phones cheaper?

If the iPhones are going to be $200, the Google Phone has to be more like $100. That is where I come from.

The Facebook IPO Fiasco

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 18: The Nasdaq board in Times Square advertises Facebook which is set to debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market today on May 18, 2012 in New York, United States. The social network site is set to begin trading at roughly 11:00 a.m. ET and on Thursday priced 421 million shares at $38 each. Facebook, a Menlo Park, California based company, will have a valuation exceeding $100 billion. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

To start at $38 and end up at $27 is a fiasco to the tune of about 40 billion dollars. To climb back up to $32 is good news. Maybe Facebook is not all hat no cattle. Maybe something is going on. I was not aware of the Nasdaq technical glitch of day one. I was thinking that one, America is nowhere close to going back to a 5% unemployment rate, the structural damages done to the economy have not been fixed yet, and two, the market does not think of dot coms as darlings that deserve P/Es of 100. It wants P/Es that are more like 20 or 50.

But then LinkedIn kept defying gravity at P/Es in the 900 range. Facebook hammered Zynga and other sexies like GroupOn but not LinkedIn. What gives? LinkedIn earnings have doubled every quarter since it went IPO. But is that sustainable? For how long? You can watch me move at two miles per hour. Then I can do four miles per hour. But how far can you extrapolate that?

Before the Facebook IPO I said the company will hit $200 billion in market cap in less than five years. A week after the IPO I said it might go in the $20-25 range before starting a slow climb up. I am glad it did not hit 25.

Even Paul Graham was saying the time for lofty valuations for tech startups was over. The Facebook fiasco was reflecting upon the entire industry. Good thing the blip lasted only a few weeks. I am standing by my $200 billion statement.

Funny, Pinterest is going into ecommerce before Facebook is. Facebook is very well positioned to do payments. It could give serious competition to PayPal. What will it acquire next? Dwolla?