Thursday, February 9. 2012Discovering your Inner Dinosaurs![]() Luis Reys - The marvels of Dinosaur Diversity. Another interesting talk at Design of Understanding conference was by artist Luis Rey. He draws and paints dinosaurs. Now, any talk by a Spanish Londoner who draws and paints dinosaurs is interesting to start with, but he told a fascinating story which is even more fascinating. Luis is a Dinosaur Geek - he wasn't content to just draw them, he had to get it abolutely right so started getting into paleontology and corresponding with all the leading dinosaur experts. This was in the 80's/90's when dinosaur reserach took two great leaps forward:
So Luis had started drawing dinosaurs with straight spines and feathers (see picture above). And guess what - no-one wanted to publish them - because everyone knows that is not what dinosaurs look like. They told him he was barking - even though he was taking advice from the best authorities in the field at the time. The Jurassic Park movies coming out at the time took the decison to run many of the dinosaurs in the traditional poses as that is what dinosaurs "should" look like. It took the BBC's "Walking With Dinosaurs" to really change perception, and it was a somewhat courageous decision for them to do it (I suspect they could take the risk at the time as they do not rely on commercial funding - another reason to keep the BBC funding model there IMO) It has taken most of the 90's and 'noughties for attitudes to change, and for feathered, fast running dinosaurs to become socially acceptable. What amused and intrigued me is the dinosaur attitude problem (ie belief in things because of traditional received wisdom rather than keeping up with a changing fact base) even existed for dinosaurs. But the lesson is that it took about 20 years from research findings to acceptance. It made me redouble my belief that we are seeing other many other "dinosaurs" all around us. I mean, if we can't even see dinosaurs clearly...... Wednesday, February 8. 2012Roadbumps on the path to Social Media monetisation
Forbes:
Indeed not. And what goes for Path goes for Facebook, in multuplicate. Getting to that $15 - 20 ARPU to justify the IPO valuation is going to be far harder than assumed I think. One to watch.... The Role of Bubbles in Technology ShiftsWhy Bubbles need to happen (Source: Carlota Perez) The What I gave a talk at the Design Of Understanding conference few weeks ago about technology prediction, a part of which was about the role of hype and bubbles in technology, been meaning to write it up, but this is it in a nutshell. Bubbles are the last stage in the Creative Destruction cycle as one technology overtakes another. This sequence is quite well described by Carlota Perez (see slide above) In essence, the new is always suspect and the old has all the big battalions on its side to prevent the new succeeding. Machavelli recognised this a long time ago when he wrote:
The Why For the Best New to emerge, there is a period of Darwinian evolution as all the new new things compete to get over The Chasm and establish themselves in the market. In technology, the very disruptive new things can often asymmetrically hurt the business models of the Old (ie the small newcomer can afford to undercut the existing behemoths for a while), and this is of course exploited (in what we call "Pirate World" ) But the Pirate World in itself is not enough to shake the Old, which has many advantages - cashflow, and typically recourse to other blocking forces like political access and regulation, and besides has the resistance of the late adopters and the reluctance of the lukewarm supporters of the new on its side. Also, the New often needs complementary infrastructure and other parts of its own value delivery chain to be built, plus money to The How The role of the Bubble is to give the New Things a sufficiently large amount of fast, cheap money (as in you know most of it will be worth nothing) - a Tsunami of Cash - to wash the foundations of the Old away. The role of Hype is to stoke the Bubble, so that the Wisdom of Crowds is converted via Irrational Exuberance into the Madness of Crowds. Perez's view is that the bubble then leads to a "Golden Age" when the services can be built out in relative calm, on massively discounted assets (eg the huge amount of pipe, power, port and ping left over by the dotcom crash). My observation is that the creation of the new involves the destruction of the old, but also carries significant collateral damage - the destruction of the Irrational Investors' wealth (or not, if you are a bank and too big to fail) which means not all new agers will see it as Golden. The So What. In my view, the Facebook IPO is the final act of the Hype cycle of the coming Social Media bubble. Just make sure, in your Irrational Exuberanace, that you are not one of those creatively destroyed in this last part of the cycle. Incidentally, for the Dinosaurs, Riepl's law shows that the Old do not die, they gradually fade away.... A very useful update comment: I found Fred Wilson interviewed Carota Perez at Web 2.0 Expo last year, and this copy of her presentation at Web Expo 2.0. Soem of what i mention here she talls about. Cracking stuff, though I'm not sure about her synthesis of the latest financial bubble burst..... Friday, February 3. 2012Facebook - valuing the billboards on your digital pathways
It's been quite interesting, that despite all the predictable booster hype, quite a few articles out yesterday on the actual value of Facebook feel $100bn might be too high - to me the real shocker was that even Henry Blodgett doesn't think it's worth $100bn at the moment (a core value of c $75 according to his calculations). I await Mary Meeker's pronouncement with eager anticipation
And of course a few of our troublemak... loyal readers asked me the same question. What do we at Broadstuff Towers think its worth? Well, the analysis we did yesterday would suggest that if you think it is the "next Google" then its about 1.75 - 2x overvalued compared to Google at IPO, so c $50bn - $60bn would be a much safer bet. If you think its "worse than Google" then head for the hills now, if you think it is 2x better, then buy - but you need to know why you think this. Based on the Broadstuff Digital Bubble Atmosphere Exposure* methodology, I'd estimate it will have an IPO valuation of c $75 bn +/- 10% So the real question, assuming you are in for the long haul, becomes "how sustainable do you think it all is" ? There is a nice article on Slate today asking if Facebook is a Good Company that goes down this line, and this comment hit me:
As far as I can see, Facebook's "analogy" business model today is mainly to erect billboards on our digital social pathways, and try and get us to turn off the road every so often to buy digital souvenirs. If this sounds suspiciously like the "eyeball" arguments that launched a thousand failed dotcoms, you'd be right. To succeed therefore, it needs to navigate the travails of its own S-1 warning: If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed. But its also more than that - it's not enough that they don't fall - to justify this valuation over time, these things all have to go up, by more than an order of magnitude by our calculation. And the next 800m users will not be as wealthy as the last 800m, and after that there aren't many left to find - so additional revenue is not going to come from a pure volume increase, but from a value per user increase. So you have to believe that there will be more money from our mobile usage, more user activities to keep you on the site, more games played, more billboards, and - The Ultimate Goal - that the billboards will be far more targeted than anything that has come before so advertisers will pay far more per view than today. And to do that you have to intrude on privacy far more than anything has done before. And for that to be viable you have to believe there will be no backlash to further privacy erosion, social or legal. Which I don't. We have neen tracking concern about privacy, and it's been growing quite rapidly in the last 2 years. Which means that Facebook's core business is going to get harder and less profitable to run over time. I don't believe there are major new economies of scale after 800m users, so no new scale benefits. So it comes down to whether you believe they can use the $5bn or so they raise to buy their way into more stickiness and newer, better and more profitable revenue streams. Which I don't believe they can do, at least in the short to medium term (I cite Skype and YouTube as evidence). I do believe that if anybody can pull it off it is Mark Zuckerberg, he has successfuly navigated all the landmines to date - but he has done it with majority ownership of a private company. But can one do the same with a much scrutinised public company, is the (tens of) billion dollar question? *Take your digit, expose it to the atmosphere....(Actually, I read a paper once that argued asset bubbles inflate underlying values by an average of c 40% - it was on the Internet, so it must be true....) Thursday, February 2. 2012Facebook - numbers and valuationGoogle vs Facebook in 2004 $, assuming c 20% inflation Now that Facebook has filed it's S-1 it is possible to look at the actual reported numbers, which are in short for 2011: Revenues £3.7bn The chart above compares the Facebook valuation against fundamentals with Google. Note that I use Google's IPO filings, its actual performance in 2003 turned out to be far better (c $1,5bn revenues and $350m profits), whereas Facebook's probably won't be. What it shows is that Facebook is in essence trying to get about 15% more value per $ of revenue (or 75% more if you plug in Google's actual 2003 performance), and underlying that is an assumption of a c 2 x valuation per user and per user dollar earned vs Google. Now Google overperformed, so it's not unbelievable at all that Facebook will hit its valuation too, but as it has set the bar higher Facebook will still be under more pressure to deliver the results than Google was. So, what do we have to believe to believe that Facebook is worth the $100bn? Firstly, you need to believe that the numbers are even achievable. A valuation of $100bn on a user base of 845m implies a valuation of c $118 per user, within a reasonable timeframe. In financial modelling that is usually taken as 5 years. There are about 2 billion people online today, most estimates think it will be about 3-3.5 billion in 5 years or so time, a reasonable estimate of the the maximum Facebook user base is probably in the region of about 1.5 bn, ie roughly double today, so let us assume the endgame is the valuation of $100bn over 1.5m people, ie about $70 per person in 5 years time. A simple approximation therefore is that Facebook needs to go from c $70/5 = c $15 ARPU, from the c $4 today. Incidentally, Google's ARPU is about $18 today. So it comes to this - do you believe that Facebook can eventually make the same sort of ARPU as Google does, and keep its current market share? Bear in mind that the next 800m people Facebook adds will have much less disposable income than the current 800,000, so the ARPU growth in ratio terms is far higher than Google had to do, as it grew from a smaller base into a wealthier market. Secondly, long term, ultimately valuation is based on profit. Facebook has a higher profitability than Google at IPO, at c 25%. Google's IPO was c half of that and it only hit the c 25% sort of ratios c 2 years after IPO, and has more or less stayed at around that level. Google now has a c $150bn valuation on c $40bn revenues and c $10bn profit, so for Facebook to justify $100bn longer term you have to believe it can hit c $6-7bn profits, ie revenues of c $24-28bn in about 5 years, and maintaining profis at about 25%. So the question is do you believe there is a sustainable 6-7x growth in profits? Thirdly, to believe the above two things, we pretty much have to believe that Facebook has as easy or easier a time in the next 5 years than Google has had, ie you have to believe competition and regulatory interference (little surprise the Facebook is beefing up its lobbying arm) will be at worst the same, preferably better and that it makes better use of its cash in funding its growth. Now this is not a "proper" analysis, but it does bracket the relative IPOs and trajectories for comparison. What it boils down to is that Facebook has set a significantly higher value per dollar earned and user gained than Google, and you have to believe Facebook gets a fairer wind for the next 5 years than Google had over its first 5 years post IPO to justify the $100bn valuation. In other words, you heve to believe it is a (2x) better company than Google. Do you believe that? Wednesday, February 1. 2012Facebook and the starting gun for the BubbletimeThe Broadstuff Bubble-O-Meter is about to hit the jackpot We were asked last week by the Grauniad to comment on the Facebook IPO valuation (see here), and to contrast it with Google, as excitement increases (or maybe not). The valuation I will deal with later, but the compare and contrast with Google is very interesting. In a nutshell, at IPO Google: - Had revenues of c $1.5bn and had been profitable for several years, making c£350m in the pre-IPO year Facebook is something like this (considerable connjecture, as its reported finances vary widely): - Revenues of between $2 and $4bn in 2011, profits between breakeven and $1bn (depending on who you read) So, Facebook and Google have quite a few similarities at IPO, but there are 4 glaring differences: - Whichever way you look at it, Facebook's valuation as a ratio of its business fundamentals is 2-3 times higher than Google's My take is that Google IPO'd earlier in its growth trajectory, and was able to more easily "grow into" its IPO value both because it had a lower valuation as a proportion of its fundamentals, and it had more growth in it as less users were connected at the time and revenue is not bounded by registered users but by number of searches per user. Now, as to the Facebook valuation - is $100bn overvalued? The answer is "what do you need to believe to get to $100bn". If you believe it is worth $100bn, then you need to believe that: - That the ARPU of c $2.5 - $5 per user can be made to fund a per-user valuation of $125. So, what do you believe..... This is a classic dotcom IPO play (small number of shares on sale, lots of hype, very high valuations). Very few make the grade. Google managed it, and more, and today has a comfortable $150bn market cap - but Facebook has set itself a far higher set of bars. In other words a lot more things have to go right, for a long time, for Facebook. The really inteesting thing will be when Facebook's numbers are published, and every analyst worth their salt will try and work out how the above will be achieved. But one thing is for certain - this is the starting gun for the Social Media bubble, as we predicted a year ago (see the Broadstuff Bubble-O-Meter above, we started it about this time last year), and we shall now see the extraordinary madness of crowds in spades - as Chris Dixon predicts: - a bunch of second-tier social media companies go public to satisfy investor demand for "social media allocations" (facebook's reportedly small float of 5b will make this more likely) The next post will be on the Patterson cycle and the role of Bubbles...stay tuned. Friday, January 6. 2012How should Politicians use Twitter?
I have been somewhat fascinated by the whole Diane Abbott affaire over the last 24 hours or so. A brief history - Diane is a black, female UK MP whose roots are in the Old Left Labour party of the 1980's, and she was having a debate over Twitter with Grauniad journo Bim Adewunmi, who has summed it up as follows:
In the course of tweeting the events around the trial, conviction and sentencing of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, I wrote: "I do wish everyone would stop saying 'the black community' though." I expanded in a followup: "Clarifying my 'black community' tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for 'black community leaders'. This led to a reply from my local MP Diane Abbott, in which she said: "I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda." I had a look at what she actually said on Twitter (given that it was clear that opinions on what she said were polarising along various party lines) and it was: @bimadew I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda. The racist accusation was when she used the term "white people", or rather when it was taken (expurgated of the #tacticasoldascolonialism) out of context by her opponents. As you can see from the overall context, the discussion is more nuanced, and its fairly clear what she is getting at. But it has caused a massive hue and cry, and sadly for Diane, as she has pulled exactly this sort of trick before herself, so her opponents have been queueing up to take revenge shots at her. IMO the best summary as to the "why" is the New Statesman: Let's call this what it is. It's pretending. It's not genuinely being offended. It's artifice, completely made up in order to get a bit of publicity for people's vexatiously contrarian columns and to get their godawful faces on television. If you're genuinely wounded by Diane Abbott's comments, I pity you. You're beyond saving. It's a wonder we white people manage to stay in control of everything in the world ever if we're so bloody sensitive -- we should be sitting in a cupboard crying all day about what the nasty lady said about us. But it's not genuine hurt; it's the sensing of a mistake by a political rival, and the careful depiction of a representation of what these woeful human beings think being offended actually is, in order to capitalise on that. That one's political opponents should be so cynical as to pull one down and then kick while one is down is so upsetting....in calmer momenets Diane may reflect on this being a karma moment Labour Party boss Ed Milliband made her apologise, but then stepped on a landmine himself when he tweeted "Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters." The message was hastily deleted, and re-written to correctly refer to the 1980s trivia quiz as "Blockbusters", but there is now a #blackbusters hashtagfussfest deriding poor Mr Milliband. To me, the lessons here are 4-fold:
There is no doubt that Twitter is a great tool for a politician to reach their audience, but the lesson here is that it has asymmetric risks (ie a small slip can cause a huge fall) when dealing with anything nuanced or sensitive, and Twitter - in my opinion - is better used as a means to point to something more nuanced elsewhere' like on a blog post, Facebook page or similar. I am reminded of Nicholas Taleb's term Black Swan - the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology - in this case. The downside of one unfortunate slip like this undoes a lot of good work. And when a Black swan falls, the vultures will always circle..... Tuesday, December 6. 2011Is the dedicated Mobile website yesterday's news?
Consider the following 3 facts:
Spot the contradiction. It seems odd to me that just as these sites are becoming less necessary, they are increasing. Clearly the time lag of consultants suggesting companies adopt mobile assets is greater than the development paths of mobile hardware Thursday, December 1. 2011Should women use the 22 year old male entrepreneur model?
How to make startups attractive to women according to Penelope Trunkwriting in VentureBeat. The argument is that startups are not for women,and women don't need start ups:
The problem is that the funding world is set up to reward behaviors of 22-year-old guys. Living on very little salary, working very long hours, making your whole life your company, traveling at the drop of a hat — these are things people do when they do not have families. It’s a life that guys who are not even in a startup choose because it’s fun for guys. Women don’t choose that kind of life. To make it more attractive they suggest 3 points. 1. Pay more money at the beginning. Women want a good house, good clothes and a cushion for emergencies. This is not sexist, this is basic research, and yes there are exceptions, but we have to talk in generalizations if we are going to talk about women as a group. Women shop more than men; women get more pleasure from buying stuff than men do. Whatever. Who cares? Women earn more than men do, so it’s a moot point. Except in the VC world, where the entrepreneur has to “bootstrap.” Women don’t like that. So VCs would have to give up on the bootstrapping mentality if they want women to do startups. Women must find their own way: And in the meantime, let’s stop pretending that the stuff of startups is the stuff that most women want for their lives. Women should use a more current blueprint for their lives—one that takes into account what is important to women rather than what is important to men. Questions in my mind:
Answers on a postcard. Red Light Restricts
The algorithms of predicting red light runners- the telltale signs are not what you think - MIT:
Another interesting application of the Internet Of Moving Things, but how wellmight is compare to good old enforcement?
Maye its just me, but I wish it was connected to an anti-car missile, so the bad guys buys it every time....
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