Research archive for META

Facebook announced a new Instagram app last evening: Introducing Layout from Instagram. For those of you who use Facebook exclusively, Instagram is more about photos, images, letting the picture tell 1000 words. If you want to know how it works, follow the link to the Instagram blog: Introducing Layout from Instagram. Again, there is a link to a help section on the Instagram blog which enables you to see how to use the new app, you can use up to 9 photos and then post them all together, via Instagram. Whilst there are many applications that allow you to do this, this is specifically for integration with Instagram, to allow you to do something different.

Oh wow. We knew that this was coming, the logistics of it was not quite something that people could get their heads around. Facebook payments are going to be a reality between two parties using the Messenger option. Check it out: Send Money to Friends in Messenger. It seems really simple and of course, as we have been saying all along, the payments systems will be the traditional ones, you need a Visa or MasterCard debit card.

Facebook. Most people, even your grandmother, has heard of it. Do you not want to be friends with your grandmother on Facebook, what is that all about? The service works seamlessly in the background whilst many users of what has become a transformative and useful service are not too aware of the company dynamics. I mean that from a profitability point of view. Sure, you know that Mark Zuckerberg is crazy rich and just around 30 years old, you know his wife is Priscilla, they live in a fairly modest suburb considering his personal wealth. His dog, Beast, has many more likes (2,127,338 when I checked this morning) than your business or organisation is likely to have. Beast last posted on the first of January, before that in September, when it was bath time. The truth is, and Facebook confirms this, people are interested in people and their goings on, the conversation does not have to be Philosophy 301.

Did you see Mark Zuckerberg in an interview at Beijing's Tsinghua University? If not, here it is, a condensed first part of the interview: Watch Mark Zuckerberg Speak Mandarin. I love the crowd reaction, I have read that his mandarin is not great, he seems to be understood and it is far better than most of the languages that I can speak! As he points out, his wife and her family are Chinese, so he needed to communicate with all of them, hence the need to learn the language.

A short note on the Whatsapp milestones, whilst we are talking about such events and progress, Jan Koum, the Whatsapp founder sent his 55th tweet last evening:

Facebook reported numbers post the market close last evening. Once your base grows bigger and bigger it becomes a mathematical impossibility to grow at the same rate. Firstly, most of the users have adopted Facebook already that were keen to do so and secondly your potential user group gets smaller. I guess one could argue that if every human with a reliable internet connection had a Facebook account, the company could have a whole lot more than 1.32 billion users. Roughly 63 percent of that base use Facebook daily. Monthly active user growth is around 3.5 percent, which I think is astonishing, others are not wowed. 40 million users were added in the last quarter and now one in five people around the world log into their Facebook accounts on a monthly basis. Differently put 4 in 5 do not have a Facebook account.

Last night we received highly anticipated results from Facebook. It's ironic that Apple results and Facebook results are released on the same day because the efficiency of the Apple products have made the Facebook mobile experience just that much better. Conversely people want fancy phones so they can access and enjoy their Facebook. Both companies compliment each other well.

Crazy. This is amazing, WhatsApp zooms to record 64 billion messages in one day. But what was quite amazing is that this announcement came on .... Twitter. Reminder. Facebook bought WhatsApp for 19 billion Dollars. Twitter is worth 27 billion Dollars. So, WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, sends record number of messages and then announces it on Twitter. Got it.

Everyone knows about Facebook, it is an extremely visible company for obvious reasons. When they do stuff like buy Whatsapp for $19bn it becomes the latest talking point around the dinner table. If GE were doing such a large acquisition it would draw half the interest. When these acquisitions are discussed the biggest talking point is why Facebook would buy such a company and how would they integrate it with their current business model. People um and ah, trying to justify the acquisition.

What the hell? Who? What? Actually someone had told me a small while back that this was the next big thing, and that it was likely to crush console's as we know them. Your PS3 is so out of date that it might as well be R2-D2 or C-3PO. OK, that is nasty, your PS3 is still as awesome as Schalk Burger. Who IS REALLY awesome! What am I talking about here? Rambling on. Well, it is Facebook and a purchase that probably came from left field. Deep square leg, or make that deep extra cover. Oculus VR is the object of Facebook's attention, and the price range is a whopping 2 billion Dollars. There is a private investor who sits on both boards, and coincidentally Instagram too - Marc Andreessen is his name, he DID NOT participate in the negotiations. Palmer Luckey founded this business in 2012. And Palmer is all of 21 years old. That is it chaps. What were you doing when you were 21? Were you selling a business to Facebook for 2 billion Dollars? No, sadly we were not.

Wow, this is absolutely huge. No, it is one of the biggest tech deals done in a while, a 19 billion Dollar transaction in which Facebook will acquire WhatsApp. The deal will be structured as follows: 183,865,778 A class Facebook shares worth 12 billion Dollars (at 65.2650 Dollars a share), 4 billion Dollars in cash and the balance, 3 billion Dollars in restricted stock (45,966,444 units) to WhatsApp employees, that will vest over the next four years. The shareholders and employees of WhatsApp will now own 7.9 percent of Facebook, you will of course be diluted as a Facebook shareholder, but will get WhatsApp, of course.

Facebook turns ten today. Amazing. Do you know any business who has over 1.23 billion customers, that is almost the entire population of India. Wow. But annual ARPU's are a mere 5.68 Dollars, astonishingly low. Each customer generates 1.55 US cents per day. That is another way of thinking about it. Low. And I guess that there are still many more opportunities to monetise that massive base.

Facebook. I remember that they were not going to be able to monetise mobile. Now it is more than half of their revenue. They were running out of teenage users. Who cares, who pays their bills? Their parents. And some old fellow I remember who covered Facebook made a great point on the box once, he said that his teenage kids see their friends every day, he hardly ever physically sees his mates from college and school, except for Facebook. For all I can, Facebook could have one fifth of the users and double the revenue. But of course they need to monetise their user base. And guess what, they are!! The business turns ten next week. Yes. Only ten, or ten already, depending on which way you look at it.

Facebook reported numbers last evening. 49 percent of revenue came from mobile, let us call it half. And I remember when everyone would get completely anxious that yes, Facebook would struggle to monetise mobile. Here is a headline from Fortune's website from July last year, which is hardly a long time ago:

Facebook. Me like. You like. Not much to not like about last evenings quarterly numbers. I was saying to Byron this morning, for crying in a bucket, this time last year the so called experts were incredibly anxious about the fact that Facebook was perceived to be unable to monetize across their mobile platforms. Well guess what, Mark Zuckerberg is smarter than most people, including the chattering classes of "investors" out there. So what if the stock price didn't pop and the IPO was a disaster. Are we all scalpers now? The company raised more money at a higher rate than the market anticipated after the greed got the better of everyone.