Why you should invest in Facebook stock, pre-IPO.
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Paul Davison and Rohan Seth’s audio-only app is the tech crush of the pandemic. Now comes the hard part: hosting a global gabfest, without the toxicity.
F-Commerce Turning Like into Buy (Part 2) Mesh 11Horizn Inc.
Social commerce is gaining momentum. Analysts are predicting that commerce from Facebook stores will hit $30 billion by 2015. Businesses of all sizes are building and testing commerce solutions inside Facebook and are looking at how they can turn conversations into conversions. Coke, Barneys, Sears, Pampers, Dove, Sephora, Lands End and many others pages have built “Shopping” Tabs in their Facebook pages. Facebook is launching, local group buying with its Deal platform and going head to head with companies such as Groupon. Facebook Credits will become the mandatory currency for Facebook games and applications as of July 1 2011. Janice Diner takes a look at this growing F-Commerce trend and explores the different commerce models that are emerging in and around this category.
Paul Davison and Rohan Seth’s audio-only app is the tech crush of the pandemic. Now comes the hard part: hosting a global gabfest, without the toxicity.
F-Commerce Turning Like into Buy (Part 2) Mesh 11Horizn Inc.
Social commerce is gaining momentum. Analysts are predicting that commerce from Facebook stores will hit $30 billion by 2015. Businesses of all sizes are building and testing commerce solutions inside Facebook and are looking at how they can turn conversations into conversions. Coke, Barneys, Sears, Pampers, Dove, Sephora, Lands End and many others pages have built “Shopping” Tabs in their Facebook pages. Facebook is launching, local group buying with its Deal platform and going head to head with companies such as Groupon. Facebook Credits will become the mandatory currency for Facebook games and applications as of July 1 2011. Janice Diner takes a look at this growing F-Commerce trend and explores the different commerce models that are emerging in and around this category.
I hope you enjoy this 101 guide to getting started with foursquare for business. And while our stories are primarily examples from our success using the tools in the restaurant business, I think you'll find many applications. Please feel free to share as much as you'd like.
We are in an era of chaos. Understanding how to harness the opportunities and bring delight to your consumer will be imperative to your brand's survival.
Why Blogs and Social Media are Effective Marketing ToolsMiriam Schwab
Companies today really need to consider adding social media and blogging to their marketing strategies. This presentation makes the case for why, and is particularly useful if you want to try to convince your boss to take your company's marketing strategy into the 21st century.
POETS AND QUANTS: HOW BRAND PEOPLE CAN LEARN TO LOVE BIG DATATom Morton
Big data is shifting the balance of power between the creative 'poets' of the communications industry and the more analytical 'quants'. Yet there is still a big role for creative minded people in a Big Data world. A lateral, humanistic view on Big Data yields better, more insightful truths, and data can be fuel for creative development. Here's how.
Shopping Goes Social - how our habits as consumers are changingDaniel Ord Rasmussen
Our habits as consumers are changing offline as well as online. We "hack" retail by finding loopholes, coupons, deals and tricks that get us what we want. We circumvent artificial boundaries such as borders by "spoofing" locations and we receive products via legal middle-men.
At the same time these online tricks are moving offline again with the advent of location based marketing via Foursquare and Facebook.
This presentation gives a quick overview of an emerging field that is changing rapidly.
I hope you enjoy this 101 guide to getting started with foursquare for business. And while our stories are primarily examples from our success using the tools in the restaurant business, I think you'll find many applications. Please feel free to share as much as you'd like.
We are in an era of chaos. Understanding how to harness the opportunities and bring delight to your consumer will be imperative to your brand's survival.
Why Blogs and Social Media are Effective Marketing ToolsMiriam Schwab
Companies today really need to consider adding social media and blogging to their marketing strategies. This presentation makes the case for why, and is particularly useful if you want to try to convince your boss to take your company's marketing strategy into the 21st century.
POETS AND QUANTS: HOW BRAND PEOPLE CAN LEARN TO LOVE BIG DATATom Morton
Big data is shifting the balance of power between the creative 'poets' of the communications industry and the more analytical 'quants'. Yet there is still a big role for creative minded people in a Big Data world. A lateral, humanistic view on Big Data yields better, more insightful truths, and data can be fuel for creative development. Here's how.
Shopping Goes Social - how our habits as consumers are changingDaniel Ord Rasmussen
Our habits as consumers are changing offline as well as online. We "hack" retail by finding loopholes, coupons, deals and tricks that get us what we want. We circumvent artificial boundaries such as borders by "spoofing" locations and we receive products via legal middle-men.
At the same time these online tricks are moving offline again with the advent of location based marketing via Foursquare and Facebook.
This presentation gives a quick overview of an emerging field that is changing rapidly.
Chapter 11 Learning Objectives1. Be familiar with Facebook’s oEstelaJeffery653
Chapter 11
Learning Objectives
1. Be familiar with Facebook’s origins, rapid rise, and rocky first-year performance as a public company.
2. Understand how Facebook’s rapid rise has impacted the firm’s ability to raise venture funding and its founder’s ability to maintain a controlling interest in the firm.
It’s hard not to be awed by what Mark Zuckerberg has created. An effort launched from his college dorm is now a species-level phenomenon. Even after deleting a jaw-dropping two billion fake accounts, roughly one in every five people on the planet has a Facebook account—an amazing track record given that Facebook is technically banned in China (taking about 20 percent of the world population off the table). Want to connect to customers? Facebook is increasingly the place to be. The firm’s daily traffic is three times larger than the viewership of the Super Bowl. Facebook accounts for the largest share of the most popular activity (social networking) on the most widely used computing devices (smartphones). The firm’s growing arsenal of apps accounts for 30 percent of US mobile Internet use. And even after two brutal years of bad press following controversies over fake news and abuse of user data, as of this writing it is the fifth most valuable public company on Earth. Outside the US, global growth is on a tear, with over 85 percent of Facebook users coming from abroad, and Zuckerberg, through his philanthropic effort Internet.org, is determined to put the entire planet online.
Figure 11.1 Largest Firms by Market Cap (in billions of $USD)
Facebook is among the most valuable firms on the planet.
Source: Public data, Aug. 30, 2019.
The Rise of Facebook and Growing Concerns
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg looked like a social media pioneer from the start. Consider this: During the weeks he spent working on Facebook as a Harvard sophomore, he didn’t have time to study for a course he was taking, “Art in the Time of Augustus,” so he built a website containing all of the artwork in class and pinged his classmates to contribute to a communal study guide. Within hours, the wisdom of crowds produced a sort of custom CliffsNotes for the course, and after reviewing the Web-based crib sheet, he aced the test. Turns out he didn’t need to take that exam, anyway. Zuck (that’s what the cool kids call him) dropped out of Harvard later that year.
By the age of twenty-three, Mark Zuckerberg had graced the cover of Newsweek, been profiled on 60 Minutes, and was discussed in the tech world with a reverence previously reserved only for the late Steve Jobs and the Google guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Zuckerberg went on to be named Time’s “Person of the Year,” and The Social Network, a (mostly fictionalized) account of Facebook’s founding, was a box-office smash, nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. Facebook’s controversial 2012 public offering valued the firm at over $100 billion, and the $16 billion raised in the offering made it (at the time) the ...
Here are the slides to my GDC presentation, "The Game of Platform Power". In our industry, history repeats itself again and again, but each new generation of developers fails to learn past lessons. Platforms in particular have a well established life cycle and their relationship with a developer changes as they mature. Yet, I regularly see developers completely caught off guards as their new favorite platform suddenly stops being their friend and starts treating them as a harvestable resource.
My small hope is that by naming and illuminating some of the common phases and practices of platforms, developers will be able to better deal with the inevitable shifts. I would like nothing better than smart game developers to divorce their businesses from the platform life cycle and build direct relationships with long lasting communities of passionate gamers.
How well do you know Facebook? Lots of marketers use the platform to promote their content and drive new business, but how good is your knowledge, really? Is Facebook advertising proving successful for you or your clients business? Facebook have made an incredible amount of changes to their advertising platform since 2004, creating a host of different options to target customers including – Lookalike audiences, Dark Posts and Retargeting ads.
As Facebook continues to evolve the advertising platform presents marketers with a huge amount of opportunity to provide contextual advertising for dream segments of their customers. In this slideshare we set out to chart the evolution of Facebook as an advertising giant and what the future may hold for it.
Social networks are well-established, as is e-commerce, but it’s only now that we’re seeing the meshing of the two and a great deal of hype around the possibilities. This report charts how retailers and other brands are using the social graph to engage consumers wherever they may be—creating more personal, accessible experiences—and to amplify word-of-mouth.
“Social Commerce” examines three key trends: the rise of Facebook commerce (retailers selling directly on Facebook), overlaying the social graph on e-commerce sites and introducing that social graph to the brick-and-mortar world. It looks at what innovative retailers and others are doing in these areas, as well as what’s driving each trend and the significance and potential for marketers. It also spotlights things to watch in this space, from apps that enable sharing while shopping to Facebook Credits.
In addition to desk research, we interviewed experts and influencers in research, technology and business, and conducted a quantitative survey in the U.S. and the U.K. The survey used SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online research tool, to poll 971 adults aged 20-plus from May 20–June 1, 2011.
DQ 2Reread the Freemiums in the Social Gaming World Case and ans.docxjacksnathalie
DQ 2
Reread the Freemiums in the Social Gaming World Case and answer the following: What does the term freemium refer to? Give some examples. Do you think this is a good model for other companies to follow? Many social games fall into this category. On the social networks, why is it difficult to generate revenue through advertising? Why is it particularly hard for social games?
Closing Case FREEMIUMS IN THE SOCIAL GAMING WORLD
Social games played on sites like Facebook and MySpace are the hottest part of the game industry. The market for social games has been dominated by three companies: Zynga (zynga.com), Playdom (playdom.com), and Playfish (playfish.com). In November 2009, Electronic Arts (ea.com) acquired Playfish for $300 million in cash and stock and guaranteed another $100 million in bonus payouts if certain milestones were met by 2012. A short time later in December 2009, Digital Sky Technologies (dst-global.com), a Russian firm with offices in Moscow and London, bought a $180 million stake in Zynga. Based on this investment, as well as other investments in the firm, many financial analysts put Zynga’s market share worth somewhere between $1.5 and $3.0 billion.
To the casual observer, these valuations seem astounding. It is the case that social games are simpler than the average video game and take much less time to play. It is also the case that they have expanded the game audience beyond traditional video gamers who tend to be young males. Yet, from an economic standpoint, the major difference between social games and video games is that the former are free. If players don’t have to pay, where does the return on investment (ROI) for companies like Electronic Arts and investors like DST come from? The answer lies in micropayments.
The
Solution
In 2007 Facebook launched a platform that enabled software developers to create applications for the site. Currently, the site has tens of thousands of applications. Similarly, MySpace, which relies on Google’s OpenSocial platform, has 4,500 applications available to users. Today the most popular application category for both of these social networks is social gaming. On Facebook, for example, there are nine games that have more than 12 million active players per month. This is more than the number of monthly players for World of Warcraft, the most popular online game. Of course, they pay to play. Among the top 10 most popular social games on Facebook, Zynga has three offerings— Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Café Word—with a combined audience of over 105 active players per month, while Playfish has two offerings— Pet Society and Restaurant City—which has 60 million active users per month.
If it doesn’t cost anything to play a social game, then how does the game company make its money. One way is with advertising. Either continually or at various times during the game, ads can be displayed. Just as the advertising firms do with the search engine companies or other Web sites, the game companies can ...
Social Media: Lecture 3 Social networking Facebook and some others…Marcus Leaning
This is lecture 3 of a course on social media at the University of Winchester. This lecture looks at the history of social networking sites and in particular at Facebook. It examines the impact of the Like, Facebook login and open graph aspect in particular.
2. Facebook
A look at various aspects of Facebook
to determine if their stock is a buy,
hold, or sell.
3. Facebook will, undoubtedly, be the biggest thing to hit the stock market since Google.
Therefore, it is worth investing in before it releases its IPO. You could still make
money at the IPO, as people did with Google. However, it’s best to begin yourrace
before anyone else has a chance to start.
Some are afraid that there is another bubble in the works:
1) “social networking is a fad”
2) “Facebook is overvalued”
3) “there’s no way Facebook can be as valuable as Boeing”
4) “too good to be true”
5) “Facebook isn’t the next Google”
4. 1) “social networking is a fad”
• Response:
– Really? When will people not find the need to connect
with family and friends? When will you not want to find
out about the other parties that went on last night? When
will employers not want to creep on employees? When
will people not want to share photos & videos?
– Not in the foreseeable future.
Note: it is impossible to refute this claim with any solid
evidence. By the same token, it is impossible to back up
this claim with solid evidence.
6. 3) “there’s no way Facebook can be as
valuable as Boeing”
• Sure there is. People can think it’s more
valuable.
7. 4) “too good to be true”
5) “Facebook isn’t the next Google”
• Facebook isn’t the next Google. It’s better.
• Most people would have said, in 2004, that
there would never be a site that would have
800,000,000 users. A mere 7 years later, it has
become reality.
• Facebook is just as valuable as Google because
the average user utilizes both each day.
8. Five reasons why one man isn’t not
buying Facebook
(guess what? One of them is that he doesn’t have the mula. Go figure.)
9. Reason #1: Someone who knows a lot more than I do is selling. While the identities of the specific sellers remain unknown,
the current consensus seems to be that most will be from venture capital investors like Accel Partners, Peter Thiel, and
Greylock Partners. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will kick in $50 million or so himself, just for some fooling around money.
But it's not a dilutive primary offering from the company. "Facebook needs no cash!" say its cheerleaders. Okay, fine. Let's
just say for argument's sake that it is early stage investors who are selling. Why would they sell? Because they're in need of
cash to invest somewhere else? The way the social network is talked about these days, it's the best investment
opportunity in town. So why would anyone want to forsake it? And don't give me that crap about VCs being "early stage"
and wanting to cash out of a "mature" investment. These people are as money hungry as any other institutional investor,
and would let it ride unless….they saw something that suggested that the era of stupendous growth was over.
Facebook reached 500 million users in July. There's been no update since, even though the company had meticulously
documented every new 50 million users to that point. Might the curve have crested? And let's not even talk about the fact
that they don't really make much money per user — a few dollars a year at most. (Its estimated $2 billion in 2010 revenues
would amount to $4 per user at that base.) I certainly haven't spent any money on the site, despite being a fairly regular
visitor. And any advertiser who is trying to target me on the social network is wasting their money. But that's just me.
Response: I think the shareholders that are selling
are just too antsy to wait for the IPO.
As for Facebook’s user growth….800,000,000 is a
great number. That’s almost 1/8 of the whole
population of the world, and almost ½ of the Internet
using community.
10. Reason #2: Goldman Sachs. I've got nothing against Goldman Sachs. Hell, I worked there. But when Reuters' Felix
Salmon says that the Goldman investment "ratifies" a $50 billion valuation, he's only half right. That is, someone,
somewhere—perhaps the Russians at DST Global—might just believe this imaginary number. (It's hard to see why,
though: DST got in at a $10 billion valuation in May 2009. Facebook's user base has more than doubled since then. So
its valuation should…quintuple?) But concluding that Goldman Sachs believes in a $50 billion valuation is poor
reasoning. As Salmon does point out, Goldman has likely earned the lead book runner slot in any initial public offering.
Consider a 20% sale of the company in such an event – or $10 billion at today's "valuation" – and a 2% underwriting fee
of $200 million. Goldman would have to share such spoils, so let's call it $100 million into their pocket. Subtracting that
underwriting fee from the Goldman investment, and you could easily make the case that for a net purchase price of
$350 million, Goldman's ante only values Facebook at $39 billion. Hey, that's just off by $11 billion, so don't worry
about it. Buy your shares where you can get them. In other words, go open a $10 million minimum private client
account at Goldman Sachs. (Who says Goldman didn't learn its lesson about shafting its own customers? This time
around, they've managed to get the customers to line up the shaft themselves.)
Response:……Goldman is positioning itself to
be the primary underwriter of Facebook’s
IPO. Plain and simple. They’re finally trying to
get something right.
11. Reason #3: Zynga. For all the success of the largely-Facebook-hosted games of Farmville and Cityville,
it's hard not to wonder what the success of the anachronistic game maker Zynga really means. Do
people really miss their Atari that much? I doubt there's any crossover between the people playing
Farmville and those playing the technologically advanced Call of Duty: Black Ops. Which is fine – to each
his own. But all the Zynga games make me think about is Wal-Mart (WMT). Which is also fine – there's
nothing wrong with being compared to one of the world's most successful companies. But here's the
disconnect: if Facebook's future success depends on aiming for the lowest common denominator with
the most people possible, that implies pretty slim margins a la Wal-Mart. You think they're going to
justify a $50 billion market capitalization through banner ads? Are you kidding me?
Response: Fuck Zynga. Facebook is worth what it’s worth.
I would be willing to pay up to $800,000,000,000 for
Facebook. There, I said it.
12. Reason #4: The niggling details. Important question: Just what are Facebook's numbers? Important
answer: Who the hell knows? In November, Zuckerberg told the world not to hold its breath for an IPO.
No worries, Mark, because I'm not. Google (GOOG), if you recall, was pretty open by the end of its life
as a private company – everybody knew what it was doing and how it was doing it. Facebook (and, in
the same sense, Twitter) reminds me of Kozmo.com during the dot-com boom. Kozmo, you will recall,
somehow had people convinced that they were going to make tons of money doing something
remarkably pedestrian – that is, delivering Ben & Jerry's by bicycle to Manhattanites. (I remember
sitting in the offices of Flatiron Partners way back when. Someone ordered some ice cream on the Web,
and – voila! – half an hour later some delivery guy shows up. Kind of like what would happen if you
called the deli on the phone. The future was ours to see!) Facebook reportedly pulled in $2 billion in
revenues in 2010. I don't know about you, but I'm disinclined to pay 25 times revenues for anything, let
alone a company the finances of which I know pretty much nothing about.
Response: Yes, Facebook enjoys its privacy. Is there a
problem with that? It simply shows that they are a
company that doesn’t have to give a shit what investors
think. Making them more valuable.
13. Reason #5: Warren Buffett. The legendary investor cautions those looking at outsize
valuations to consider one's purchase of company stock in a different way than price of an
individual share, whatever it may be. He suggests one look at the total market valuation – in
this case, a sketchy $50 billion – and to consider: Would you buy the whole company for that
price, if you had the money? The market value of Goldman Sachs is just $88 billion. I'd take
more than half that company over the whole of Facebook any day of the week. I bet Warren
Buffett would too.
Response: As stated before, I would be willing to pay $800,000,000,000 for Facebook.
14. • Think about it:
– Myspace started 2003, Facebook started 2004.
One failed, the other thrived.
– Google started 1998. They went public in 2004.
They are still going strong.
– Facebook, if its IPO is late 2012, will be one year
later than Google’s timeline. If anything, its not
rushed.
15. Number of users of various social networking services
STOP! Look around you. How many people
that you can see do you think have Facebook?
As we can see by Exhibit A, 800,000,000 people worldwide utilize Facebook. This is roughly 1/8 of
the entire planet. Facebook has staying power. It would take almost the intervention of God to
change Facebook being number one. By the very fact that they have so many users, they make it
hard for serious competitors like Google+ to compete because everyone’s friends are on
Facebook. And Google is good at doing searches. They think that just because they have brand
name power that they can play the social networking game. There is a reason Facebook is
number one. They do one thing, and they get it right.
16. Facebook Projected Revenues
We see that in 2010, Facebook’s revenue was $2.0B. It is estimated that
by 2015, it will have grown to $12B. This represents a Compound Annual
Growth Rate (CAGR) of 43% over the 5-year period.
24. The Bottom Line
It is debatable whether Facebook is a buy. But I would say it is a buy based solely
on its intrinsic value. Who won’t want a piece of the most populous social
networking site?
I cannot invest in Facebook, pre-IPO. I am not an accredited investor: not worth
$1,000,000 and don’t make $200,000 a year.
However, Austin College’s Student Managed Investment Fund is worth $1,000,000.
It might require some fancy money sorting, to get approved, but I think it would be
well worth it.
I would suggest an investment of $25,000. Assuming $35 per share, this would get
the Investment Fund 714 shares.
I would suggest holding onto it until it is worth $100,000. This assumes that shares
will eventually be worth $140. Google is roughly $550.