Why The Search For the Next Facebook - or the Next Steve Jobs - is Fruitless

We are in a neverending hunt to find the "next Facebook" or the "next Steve Jobs." We never will. Here's where we should be looking instead.

Read the full post on Forbes

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Sorry PED, Of Course Apple Can And Will Buy Twitter

Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune.com thinks it's silly to suggest that Apple would be Twitter for $10B. By his logic, Apple never would have launched an iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, TV, or pay a regular dividend.

Read the full post on Forbes

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What's Up With 'Big Data'?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- One of the myths of the last two years in technology is that "big data" is going to allow all these amazingly personalized services for us.

It hasn't happened.

Katie Roof, a journalist, tweeted the other day: "I get random roofing companies following me on Twitter... Roof is really my name..."

Read the full post in TheStreet

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Here's My Fix for Facebook: Make Facebook a Subsidiary of Instagram With Zuck Reporting to Systrom

How could you radically remake Facebook into a mobile company? Make it a subsidiary of Instagram with Kevin Systrom running it.

Read the full post at Forbes

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Facebook's MySpace Moment: Why Twitter Is Already Bigger Than Facebook

Facebook might have just hit its MySpace moment in coolness, passed on the way up by Twitter. As coolness goes, so goes, users, revenues and profits.

Read the full post on Forbes

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Would an Apple & Twitter Marriage Be a Match Made in Heaven?

My chat with Macke on why I love Twitter - and why Apple should buy it:

[Long AAPL]

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Apple's 10 Biggest Mistakes Since Steve Jobs Returned

Apple has made an almost perfect string of decisions since Steve Jobs returned to the company in the 90s. What are its 10 biggest mistakes over that time period?

Read the full post in Forbes

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Twitter is Now Twice as Big as Facebook - Here's Why

Katy Finneran of Bloomberg just tweeted that “Twitter’s 2012 mobile ad revenue exceeds Facebook‘s 2012 mobile ad revenue, $129.7 million to $72.7 million.” These numbers are eMarketer.

That’s huge news.  It essentially means that Twitter is now a bigger company than Facebook.  Here’s why.

Read the full post in Forbes

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Twitter's Doing Exactly The Right Thing Cutting Off Leeches

Twitter's doing exactly the right thing by taking back ownership of its own product and shutting off LinkedIn from leeching off its success.

Read the full Forbes post here

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Why The Next Shoe To Drop Post-Instagram Is Apple Buying Twitter for $10 Billion

The logic for Apple buying Twitter here.

Read the full post on Forbes

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Facebook-Instagram: Here Comes the Flood

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "Kodak Goes Bankrupt and Instagram is worth a Billion Dollars. 2012, y'all"

That was a tweet from @benhjacobs that I retweeted Monday and immediately got hundreds of retweets from my followers.

For some reason, it seemed to capture the sense of awe from many over the significant milestone.

But it also gets at something else that's amazing in this story. How a small little photo application can be worth so much more -- in such a short time -- compared to an American icon. It says just how important "mobile" is in the business world today.

Read the full post on TheStreet

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Why Are Twitter's Revenues So Puny? Time to Grow Up

Twitter is celebrated as a big social media success. The reality is that its current revenues suck.

Read the full post on Forbes

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Can We Stop Saying Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Don't Want to Go Public Now?

Web companies don't want to IPO these days because Sarbanes-Oxley makes it too cumbersome? I don't buy it. Just watch.

Read the full post here at Forbes.

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Why You Should Opt Out of the LinkedIn IPO

LinkedIn is the central place to find professional profiles and that could help the company succeed in time. At the moment, though, it's got a problem making money.

Read the full post here at Forbes.

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What is Jack Dorsey Doing Running Both Twitter and Square?

Jack Dorsey is now working "200%" at two full-time jobs running Twitter and Square. He's naive if he thinks trying to do it all won't have negative consequences for both companies down the road.

Read my full post at Forbes.

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Sina's Weibo Growth Means It's Significantly Undervalued

Tue 12/21/10 11:30 AM EST -- Eric Jackson

Stocks in this video: SINA | NTES | DANG | AOL | SOHU | YOKU

Eric Jackson says Sina's Weibo service will pass Twitter in number of users next year. Maybe Weibo isn't worth $4 Billion, like Twitter was valued at, but it's still worth more than what Sina's stock price indicates. Eric owns SINA.

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Sina's Got Growth Power in Weibo

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor12/08/10 - 07:28 AM EST

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Most American investors are aware that Sina(SINA_) andSohu(SOHU_) are among the big Web portals of China. They know that both have been around for a long time and that both sites look cluttered with information and ads compared with their American counterparts. However, there's much more to the story, especially with what's been cooking at Sina over the last 18 months.

As with any area of investing, it pays to dig beneath the surface of the common bullet points about a company to really figure out its competitive strengths and industry dynamics. The great American portals of the Internet's first wave have either been greatly diminished -- like AOL(AOL_) or Yahoo!(YHOO_) -- or have morphed into part of a broader online strategy like Microsoft's(MSFT_) MSN.

Arguably, the most exciting areas of the consumer Web in the last 10 years are social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, both of which are private. So although both have seen their private valuations balloon over the last few years an argument could be made that public investors haven't appreciated yet their full value in those of comparable companies. But there are no such comparable companies in the U.S., right? True. But look at China.

Youku, one of China's "YouTubes," will come public later this week, while one of China's "Facebooks" --Renren -- will come public in the coming weeks.

Sina, however, has managed to grow its own Twitter. It's called Weibo and it's the biggest reason for the recent ramp-up in the stock price and why Sina is still considerably undervalued compared to where it will be in six to 12 months from now.

Most are familiar with Twitter's success story. It started in late 2006 so it's now four years old. People at first couldn't understand who would be self-indulgent enough to update the world that he just ate a ham sandwich. Few realized that for many users the Twitter stream would become a primary way of getting information -- like an old RSS fee -- as well as staying in touch with friends and on top of areas of interest.

........

[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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Reuters: Do social networks like Twitter belong in media?

Fri Jul 10, 2009 3:34pm EDT

By Alexei Oreskovic - Analysis

SUN VALLEY, Idaho (Reuters) - If there's one group of executives at this week's Sun Valley media and technology conference who ought to be in good spirits, it's the handful steering the fleet of Internet social networks.

The buttresses of old media institutions, from print to television, are under stress from the advertising downturn, but social media is thriving as the world flocks to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

But the glow of social media is tempered by the hazy business models underlying the Internet's latest trend. The world is talking about Twitter, but as far as anyone knows, the San Francisco-based microblogging site has yet to earn a dime.

So even as Twitter's Evan Williams and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg were seen conversing with CEOs from Google Inc to DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc and Amazon.com Inc to Dell Inc, there were no signs these talks would soon lead to the deals that have made the Allen & Co conference famous.

Indeed, Rupert Murdoch said Twitter would be a tough investment to justify for News Corp because it has not yet come up with a sustainable way to make money.

"Be careful of investing here," Murdoch told reporters.

Sony Corp Chief Executive Howard Stringer was similarly blunt.

"A lot of people are doing very well making very little money," he said, when asked about opportunities in social media. "That's not a club I'm willing to join."

Early combinations between old and new media, such as News Corp's acquisition of MySpace for $580 million in 2005, offer reasons for caution.

Once the top dog in social media, MySpace's popularity has been overtaken by Facebook. And when MySpace's $900 million advertising deal with Google comes to an end in July 2010, it's not clear what the future holds for the site.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was coy when asked if he would renew the three-year deal with MySpace at $900 million.

"Never say never," he told reporters, but then talked about changes in the marketplace that could affect the terms of any deal. "We have more tricks up our sleeve now."

PAID VS FREE

Sales of traditional media staples such as newspapers and DVDs are in a multiyear and seemingly inexorable decline. By contrast, Facebook's active users doubled in eight months to top 200 million in April and U.S. visitors to Twitter surged 83 percent that month over March, according to comScore.

Social media and user-generated content have achieved a level of legitimacy in recent months as people turned to Twitter and Google's YouTube for up-to-the-minute information about major news events such as Iran's post-election protests.

"Everybody is talking about Twitter," Liberty Media Corp Chairman John Malone said. "It's got wonderful promotional juice because so many celebrities are talking about it and using it."

But he added: "It's pretty hard to think of an advertiser base for Twitter, but maybe some creative person will come up with it."

Much of the talk at Sun Valley revolved around whether social media should be free for consumers and supported by advertising, or if a fee-based business model was better.

What is also unclear is whether social networks belong under the roof of Internet companies or traditional media.

Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and others have criticized MySpace under News Corp for focusing too much on selling ads and not enough on innovation.

"The issue is how do you continue to run Internet companies as Internet companies and making sure you keep that DNA," said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman at Sun Valley.

While News Corp's acquisition of MySpace may not be a home run, Google's $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube shows tech companies have not fared much better -- most analysts believe YouTube operates as an unprofitable unit within Google.

Still, Ironfire Capital's Eric Jackson, a former shareholder of Yahoo Inc, thinks social networks fit better with Web services offered by the likes of Google or Yahoo, than within declining traditional media businesses.

"There are questions around the revenue-generating horsepower behind some of these social networking sites," he said. "And just kind of bolting on a Twitter to a Viacom or a Time Warner, that's not going to do it."

(Additional reporting by Robert MacMillan and Yinka Adegoke, editing by Tiffany Wu and Andre Grenon)

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Twitter's Innovation Drought

Sure, it's growing like crazy. But growth and innovation needn't be either/or pursuits, especially when you've got Twitter's cash

By Eric Jackson

Viewpoint

June 5, 2009, 9:28PM EST

I love Twitter. I'm in the minority of users who check it and comment at least a couple of times each day. I even have two accounts—one personal (@ericjackson), and one for my company, activist investment firm Ironfire Capital (@ironfirecapital). I set up my personal account over two years ago and have watched in surprise and admiration at how widely the service has been adopted. Forget Oprah. When I finally saw some of my formerly not-very-tech-savvy friends signing up a few months ago, I knew Twitter had gone mainstream.

Twitter's three thirtysomething co-founders—Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey—have been on a media blitz of late. And how can you not be happy for these guys? They're all down-to-earth. No hint of arrogance or entitlement. It's a feel-good success story.

People who cover Twitter in the media often criticize it for its lack of revenue, even with its impressive growth. However, I have grown baffled and annoyed at one of Twitter's greater nonaccomplishments: Since I've been using the service, its functionality and offerings have barely improved.

It's virtually the same Twitter experience today as it was two years ago. The only difference is that there are more users. You update, follow, unfollow, reply, or send direct messages. That's it. I understand that part of Twitter's power is its simplicity. But there are still no ads, search isn't easily customizable or useful, and there's been no evident push into location-based services despite the talk.

Outside Innovations

To view the most creative innovations in Twitter from the last couple of years, you have to look outside the company, to related third-party applications or services that have cropped up using the Twitter platform. I use TweetDeck as my desktop client for checking on my Twitter stream during the day; it's infinitely more efficient than the company's own clunky site. I often check on stock news through StockTwits. I shorten links using bit.ly or another shortening service. Yet all these helpful innovations have emanated from outside Twitter's confines.

I'm all for opening up your service and getting other people to create apps and services that ride on top of your platform. Everyone wants to be open these days. Facebook's doing it. Yahoo!'s (YHOO) doing it. It makes sense to get others to work for free on tools that make more users dependent on your platform.

Yet I still have had this nagging question: What are employees inside Twitter working on to make the service better? At the recent D7 conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Williams and Stone confirmed that Twitter has 43 employees. This is a big increase over years past, when there were only about 20 people working at the company.

Venture capital friends have told me they usually estimate a company's cash-burn rate at the number of employees multiplied by $100,000 a year. This implies it would cost Twitter $4.3 million a year to keep going at its current size. Bump that up a little because of extra server needs compared with most tech startups. At that pace, with more than $55 million raised to date, the company likely has another 6 to 10 years with the current cash in the bank. And the truth is, Twitter could raise much more if it needed to—likely at pre-bubble valuations, judging from the $200 million Facebook recently raised from DST Ventures.

So my question remains: Why is this company being slow to seize the opportunity in front of it? Why are there not more features, services, or ads being tested? To be fair, Twitter has search, which it didn't two years ago.

It's useful if I quickly want to check who won the most recent NBA Final or see what other people thought of last night's Lost episode. But Twitter didn't even create its search—it bought Summize and integrated it. I'm not complaining. Summize has been great. But why hasn't Twitter extended it to be more interesting and useful?

Thinking Small

With good reason, the company has focused a lot of attention on simply keeping the service running. From its early days, Twitter's popularity has led to periodical crashes, epitomized by the now infamous "Fail Whale" graphic. The problem subsided but has returned in the last few months amid a traffic spike. CEO Williams recently acknowledged the internal focus on scalability: "For the entire history of the company, most of the resources have gone to managing growth, and that is still the case. … If it weren't growing nearly as fast, we would be building a lot more things."

I disagree with the assumption that growth precludes innovation. My hunch is that the real cause lies with the co-founders and their board: These guys are in uncharted territory managing a business of this size, and their directors haven't provided enough guidance. In the same story, Williams said: "I've started a bunch of companies but never run one of this size." When you run small companies, you think small. Managers of larger businesses are more accustomed to scope, complexity, and additional ambiguity. As Twitter has blossomed, the co-founders appear to have focused too much on only their biggest problem, the Fail Whale.

Imagine if Yahoo's then-CEO Tim Koogle had told his troops in 1997 that they shouldn't do new-product work until they ensured that the business would be able to keep up with the explosive growth it was then experiencing. It's ludicrous.

Twitter's Board Needs to Step Up

I don't fault the co-founders entirely. None of us can know what we don't know. But that's what advisers and boards are for. This board knows that companies can walk and chew gum at the same time. It is possible to scale the business on an incredible upward trajectory while still building out new features. It's not either/or. They've also known the company has plenty of cash to try a lot of things.

I can't help but wonder if the Twitter directors have come down with a case of Silicon Valley rock star-itis. Etched in the brain of every tech VC are the baby faces of Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, Google's (GOOG) Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Twitter's funders have made it into the "club" of investing in the Next Big Thing, where it can be difficult to balance back pats with serious advice, debate, or disagreement. The cardinal rule of this club is: Don�t upset the founders. (For another example, see Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook board.)

There's an appropriate amount of media and press to do to promote a company, but Twitter's co-founders and its board need to start building a better company with better products instead of going around talking about how it all started and how they're discussing lots of ideas for making money.

At the time of publication, Jackson did not hold shares in the companies mentioned.

Jackson is founder and president of Ironfire Capital and the general partner and investment manager of Ironfire Capital US Fund and Ironfire Capital International Fund.

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Tweet Some Dealmakers on Follow Friday

Thanks for the mention!

Published June 5, 2009 at 4:30 PM
TheDeal.com

It's Friday, and if you use Twitter you know that Friday is time to tweet out who you love to follow during the week on #followfriday. So we are going to give you some of our favorites to add to your twitter stream.

@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini is a professor at Stern School, NYU, chairman of RGE Monitor and Web Entrepreneur.
Fun to follow: Dr. Doom gives you the latest updates on why the world and the economy sucks.

@fredwilson Fred Wilson, co-founder, Union Square Ventures (and Flatiron Partners during the dot-com days)
Fun to Follow: Follow Wilson's A VC blog, which is required reading in venture capital circles and get exposure to great bands you might never have heard of, like Magnetic Fields on fredwilson.fm.

@FAquila Frank Aquila is a M&A and corporate governance lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell.
Fun to Follow: He has some great analysis on the economy, bankruptcy and M&A.

@infoarbitrage Roger Ehrenberg is a reformed Wall Streeter turned early-stage investor via IA Capital Partners LLC and runs the Infoarbitrage blog.
Fun to Follow: Ehrenberg has some witty comments, provides useful links and sports scores for baseball fans.

@JasonCalacanis Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com (founder of Weblogs Inc., Silicon Alley Reporter back in the day)
Fun to Follow: Staying on top of the West Coast startup scene, he often makes great comments like calling Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales a "poser," not an entrepreneur. Plus, he's a foodie.

@TiffanyKahnenTiffany Kahnen is a corporate attorney involved with mergers and acquisitions, Strategic Transactions; W3 professional soccer agent, entertainment lawyer and general corporate counsel
Fun to follow: She offers ntertaining posts and good advice especially about IP.

@HowardLindzon Howard Lindzon, co-founder of StockTwits, creator of WallStrip, long-time investor
Why Must Follow: He offers savvy stock-trading info, plus provocative ideas like his urging Twitter to go public.
Fun to Follow: He offers stock trading tips. Plus, he's very funny and knows how to cuss creatively.

@TylerNewton:Tyler Newton is a private equity investor at Catalyst Investors.
Fun to Follow: Tyler has some interesting links and follows middle-market companies in Internet and media.

@GregWNeedham Greg W. Needham is the vice president of marketing and business development at NorthShore Capital Advisors.
Fun to Follow: He provides some interesting commentary about the economy and middle-market private equity trends.

@jdriveJames D. Robinson is the co-founder and managing rartner of RRE Ventures.
Fun to Follow: He has some good insights on VC, technology, pop culture and life in general.

@ericjackson Eric Jackson is a managing member at Ironfire Capital LLC.
Fun to Follow: He provides funny frequent posts and trading tips.

There are many more dealmakers on Twitter that are worth following. Thanks to Mary Kathleen Flynn @mkflynn, Nathaniel Baker @natbaker and Tom Groppe @dealscape for their recommendations. If you would like to follow me or pop me a tweet, I'm @newsgirlmw, and be sure to include your #followfriday recommendations. - Maria Woehr

See TheDeal.com's Twitter pages

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