Entries by Alan Patrick

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:

Facebook’s all-encompassing mission to “make the world more open and connected” seems positively zany. It’s not only that Facebook is ambitious; lots of Web companies, especially Google, strike the same revolutionary tone. What’s different about Facebook is its product: Facebook is us. You go to Google for Web pages, you go to Apple for computers, and you go to Amazon for stuff. What does Facebook give you? Me and you and everyone we know. Or, to quote another movie: It’s people! Facebook, is made out of people!

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....)

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
Operating costs 2bn
EBIT $1.7bn
Tax $0.7 bn
Profit $1 bn
845m users

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?

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
- Was a $23bn IPO, ie a ratio of about 15 of IPO $ value/$ revenue, and sold c 8% of its shares at IPO
- Had c 50% of the search market share of about 1bn people online at the time, and was achieving about $2-3 annual revenue per user (ARPU)
- If you assume that translates into about 500 million users, Google's IPO value per user is about $50
- Had been going about 7 years

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)
- Is seeking a $80 - 100bn IPO, ie a ratio of between c 25 and 50 (on $4bn and $2bn revenue estimates respectively) IPO $ value/$ revenue, and will sell c 10% of its shares
- Which translates into a c $2.5 - $5 ARPU of current users
- Has c 800 million registered users, of about 2bn people online - about 40% of all users - at $100bn that is a $125 per-user valuation
- Has been going for c 8 years

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
- Facebook's user base is expected to grow by c 25% - 33% next year and revenues are expected to grow by a similar amount. Google more than doubled its user transactions and revenues in the year after IPO.
- The ratio of IPO value to user ARPU was c 16, for Google, c 30 - 50 for Facebook
- Arguably, Google faced less opposition from elsewhere (privacy etc) that could impact the business model profitability.

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.
- Google had $2-3 ARPU on $23m valuation, and ARPU is c $20 today - so Google hit its numbers. Do you believe Facebook can make a similar jump in ARPU?
- There is probably about a maximum doubling of Facebook users possible, so you have to believe by far the bulk of this growth is in revenue per user from Ads, games etc.
- That Facebook's business model is very scalable, and that there are better economies of scale in Social Networks than in Search so profits are long term sustainable.

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)
- high private valuations for social media companies will last at least another year
- the press will write thousands of breathless stories that make it seem like the future of western culture depends on new facebook revenue streams (see coverage of google's business model post-IPO)
- facebook will continue to do small talent acquisitions until they have their "Google Video" moment and then like all mature tech companies will start acquiring real businesses for 1b+ valuations.
- facebook will - in the eyes of the press - go from darling to "evil" over the next 5 years. (again, see google coverage). (My note - it is already see as more evil than Google ever has been)
- the next 1-2 years will mark the end of this "Patterson cycle", after that, really interesting innovation will start gestating for the next cycle.

The next post will be on the Patterson cycle and the role of Bubbles...stay tuned.

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."

We went back and forth for a few tweets more and then Abbott sent out the tweet that caused the furore: "White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism." Nothing much happened, until late night, when I began to get a flurry of replies from non-followers. On Thursday morning, MP Louise Mensch retweeted it with her addendum: "you what? <~~~ #racism". Abbott has since apologised and Thursday afternoon deleted the tweet. The remainder of our conversation is still on Twitter.

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.

@bimadew Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

@StephanieBusari @bimadew I am not talking cultural differences. I am talking political tactics. #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism (This was the one that was accused of being racist and was deleted)

Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters.

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:

Firstly, Twitter is a very bad tool to have any nuanced discussion on.

Secondly, Your opponents will gleefully seize on any phrase and edit it to suit their purposes of attacking you (that's par for the curse), but it is so much easier not to see (deliberately or no) the nuances of an argument of a few twts, compared to something with more words in it - even an interview transcript on TV would have more opportunity for Ms Abbott to argue she was misunderstood.

Thirdly, a slip (freudian or otherwise) can undo weeks, if not months of careful PR image building and lead to a story out of nothing like #blackbusters

Fourthly, once out the story metamorphoses into a metastory - no one is taking about what Ms Abbott or Mr Milliband actually said now, its all about being racist or foolish, so no amount of Spin Doctoring can put these back in their boxes, they will just have to wait out the storm

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.....

Consider the following 3 facts:

- I now own a tablet and a smartphone, so the dedicated mobile site is irrelevant for me. I am far from alone.

- Mobile sites by and large have lower functionality and a crapper user experience

- There seems to be an increasing number of sites recently wanting to point me to their mobile site (and i know from previous experience once you are there you are stuck - there is usually no way back)

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

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.

......

The thing is, women in their late 20s are the happiest they will be in their whole life. They are very happy. So I don’t think they are walking around wishing they could do a startup. I don’t think they care.

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.

2. VCs would need to give up on speed. They would need to decide that their rate of return on investment can be slower, and they would need to learn how to invest in companies that could go a little slower. Such companies would want to take short breaks during summer vacation, for example, when the kids are home. VCs would have to be more patient, with a family-friendly policy toward growth and exits.

3. VCs would need to raise their own funds differently. You say, “Slow and easy? Then it’s not a startup!” And that might be true. But if we are really missing so many opportunities because women’s ideas are not getting through to market, then the market is probably so desperate for these ideas that VCs can afford to let them develop more slowly. And if someone would get to the market faster, well, then we are not really missing out on having women’s ideas in the status quo, are we?

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:

- VC's have not so far felt the need to worry about female VC's, what will tip them over?

- Is the 22 year old male entrepreneur the only fundable model?

Answers on a postcard.

The algorithms of predicting red light runners- the telltale signs are not what you think - MIT:

To predict red light behavior, MIT’s car geeks looked into all sorts of variables. Where you or I might think, “tricked out ride … tinted windows … young driver … we’re in New Jersey … yep, he’s going through the light,” MIT tracked more concrete data and found it could confidently separate potential violators from compliant cars by tracking vehicle deceleration (or lack thereof) and distance from the traffic signal. For all this to work, says MIT professor Jonathan How, the algorithms need a new generation of smart cars with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, or short range transponders that constantly report location, speed, direction, rate of acceleration, and brake status.

Another interesting application of the Internet Of Moving Things, but how wellmight is compare to good old enforcement?

It’s unclear how many lives would be saved each year if the red-light running algorithm makes its way into a future generation of cars with vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The most would be 700; last year there 32,788 US traffic fatalities. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are 2.3 million car crashes at intersections each year, with 7,000 deaths; 700-plus fatalities are the result of running red lights. But no predictive model is 100% accurate, drivers won’t always listen to good advice, and half the deaths are probably also logged as drunken driving or no-seat-belt fatalities as well. (Fatalities, like success, have many fathers.) Cut DUI fatalities with tougher enforcement and you’ll take a big bite out of red light fatalities; the MIT algorithm ought to cut the toll still further.

Maye its just me, but I wish it was connected to an anti-car missile, so the bad guys buys it every time....

Remember Whuffie? It was gong to allow you to tell the cowboys from the genuine service providersand extract favours for being a good customer. Downside is when the service providers turn it back on the customers - CNet

Dentist Stacy Makhnevich requires patients to sign a form handing her copyright to any online reviews. Should the reviews not glow in the dark, she allegedly has them removed for breach of copyright. This seems entrepreneurially nifty, if legally shifty.

......

Organizations, though, can be formed on both sides of an argument. Indeed, a body called Public Citizen has taken out a class action suit against Makhnevich.

The suit claims that not only did the dentist make use of the legally questionable Medical Justice forms, but that she charged an unhappy patient $100 a day because he wrote negative reviews (about her billing practices, not her dentistry) and refused to take them down.

It seems that the two sites where negative reviews were posted--Yelp and DoctorBase--also refused to have the reviews removed

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Social Biz fundis say your brand is what your customers think of you - seems like also you may be what Brands think of you...

Your purchases as eBay Ratings are the New CRM. In spades. We told ya.

Today is a day that comes round once a century - 11/11/11 (And the US and UK calendars actually are in line too). It is also the day when the the Great War ended, and we choose to remember the dead on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which was when the guns stopped shooting and it was all quiet on the Western Front.

For a while.

George Santayana noted that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". As well as remembering those who fell, its also worth also rembering why another war started on the Western Front, especially in 2011. After World War One there was a time of conspicuous consumption, and then a Great Depression. During the Great Depression, the Ordinary Man was essentially mugged financially by the bankers and capitalists of that era while the state stood by or colluded. The net effect was to push the desperate Ordinary Man to vote for autocratic, populist regimes in many countries, even in the USA the New Deal was a major swing towards the Powerful State. It is now in danger of happening again.

After WW2 a new social compact was formed in the West, with State tax and spending forcing a trickle down from rich to poor to reduce wealth disparity. That compact has largely disappeared, the wealth gap has been in reverse for about 20 years (back to pre WW1 / WW2 levels worryingly), and the rump is now being increasingly rapidly rescinded. Despite being bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, the banks have not changed their behaviour at all - if anything it has got worse as they now know they won't be asked to pick up any mess they create. At least in the 1930's the US Government had the fortitude to bring in the Glas Steagal Act to separate "normal" banking from casino banking. In 2011 no government has had the balls. So 2008 will likely happen again, soon.

Unelected governments are now in power in Greece and Italy, Europe is now essentially being run by a cadre of unelected Technocrats, democratic process is being flouted left right and centre. In the UK the tax burden on the Ordinary Man is being ramped up, as subsidies are cut, in parallel with reducing tax burdens on the rich and corporate sectors.The tent cities in St Paul's and elsewhere are little different to the early protests of the 1930's, and mark the phase when most citizens still trusted their governments to act in their interests. The next steps, when people stopped trusting their Governments, are far worse - in the 1930's that directly led to the guns opening up on the Western Front again. We have been here before, the tragedy is if we don't remember it now, we will repeat it.

One of the big differences between now and then is modern comms technology that returns power to people - as the Arab Spring has shown, electronic comms can greatly empower the weak people vs the strong vested interests. Little surprise therefore that the strong are now arguing hard to restrict access to technology in tough times (eg shut down the Internet when there are riots). Hitler silenced his opposition by burning the Reichstag and blaming it on the Communists. Our role, in the Tech community, is to be very wary of useful public and democratic assets and rights being removed, and the removal being blamed on phantom "enemies of the state" or "economic necessities" - muslim fundamentalists, evil rioters, big bailout bazookas etc etc. And to speak out for these digital freedoms, because pressure to give them up is only going to intensify, and will come from all sorts of seemingly innocent and worthy angles.

So, while we remember the dead this year, it's not just 1918 and 1945 we must not forget, Its 1930 - 39 we also must remember now.

Interesting article by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch EU on Tech blogging in Europe - the times, he says, are a-changing:

Now, in 2011, the scene and perhaps the economics, are starting to change. The tech scene itself is bigger, there is more potential money around. There’s just more heat. I daresay a few people are eyeing up the market.

But even in standalone media terms it’s not a ‘straight’ play. Most of the European tech blogs are either run by people who also consult on the side, or, as in the case of TheNextWeb, are attached, like a Pilot Fish to a their host shark, to a large annual conference. However, recently, a couple of things have changed.

Other big guns have parked their tanks on the European lawn. GigaOm now has a European writer, Bobbie Johnson (based in Brighton), so does WSJ Europe (Ben Rooney, in London), VentureBeat has Ciara Byrne in Amsterdam and The Next Web (especially with Martin Bryant in Manchester) has done a pretty good job internationalising in English (although good luck trying to monetize that Dutch language blog guys). Wired UK‘s magazine’s site has become an important adjunct to the print title. Some might say it’s already the ‘Vanity Fair’ of tech. So, leaving aside the economics of online publishing, in editorial terms alone, pan-European coverage of tech and startups has never been better.

I do hope the economics change - we are that classic "Consultancy-with-a-blog" model Mike mentions above, in 2006 we felt that you had to put your mouth where your money was (or in blogging's case, wasn't...) and actually use the technology we were consulting on. We have certainly learned a lot from blogging and the blog has led to some interesting assignments and opportunities indirectly, and forged some good friendships, but it has certainly not been a profitable endeavour - we see it very much as a marketing cost. In fact, we took a bit of a hiatus this summer because we were so darn busy with client work!

It's interesting that the US blogs now have a "European Foreign Correspondent" too, so lets see, maybe Mike is right. Our own observation is that there are only 3 scenes in Europe that are really worth keeping an eye on - London, Berlin and the European emigres to Silicon Valley (with maybe Paris deserving the occasional glance as a 4th) as pretty much anything happening in Europe will wash up in one of these nets. Most of the running is still very US centric.

Mike also wants to see more attitude...well, Broadstuff has always been a tad, well, satirical - Bubblewatch has been this year's running joke - In fact more than one person has told us we could never get Ads owing to that Broadsnark. We are quite proud of that actually

So clearly we may even be on the right track.