Research archive for META

Yesterday the fellows over at Facebook announced that they were going to be adding a "Vine-like" video feature through your Instagram app on your phone. I updated my Instagram and hey presto, posted my very first video online. Which includes interactions with my lovely wife on the feed commentary. So join Instagram and start following your friends and post your pictures that way, you can either choose to be private and have only your mates follow you, or be public and post many pictures and now videos.

Facebook had their annual and fourth quarter numbers yesterday. Like Amazon.com this is a company that is on a crazy upward trajectory, so sometimes it might be difficult for some to judge the stock reaction. Both the instant numbers (which is a little like drinking instant coffee, you can tell, I am a snob in this department), top line and bottom line beat expectations, but there was a marked surge in costs. Costs that were increased by adding more infrastructure as well as more staffers in order to be able to continue to innovate. Because ultimately that is what you are buying here. Costs and expenses increased a whopping 82 percent in the quarter. The company on a GAAP basis made nothing last year, on a per share basis it clocked one cent. A penny for 2012. On a non-GAAP basis the company earned 56 US cents per share. So, basically the multiple is infinite. For the time being.

Facebook launched their third big offering, or that was what I was led to believe, last evening. A search function. With a weird name, "Graph Search". Now, according to the Business Insider who suggested that Facebook should have just called it "Facebook search", the term in tech world, social graph, refers to your network. Even Facebook network would or could have worked a bit better. If you are looking for the Facebook explanation, look no further: About Graph Search. As Paul said, this only works well if you make sure that your mates are active and you make sure that you are active. If you are active and post where you have been, what it was like, what you like, then one can get a better search result for all concerned.

Facebook stock catapulted higher, over the 30 Dollar mark, Sheryl Sandberg sold stock last week at 28 Dollars. Something about diversifying, I guess that rings true for me. But this was a strange announcement from Facebook, quite simply it said "Come and see what we are building". The BusinessInsider has a few views on what it could be: Here Are All The Rumors About What Facebook Will Announce At Its Mysterious Jan. 15 Event. A phone? Maybe. I suspect some sort of communication software. The stock was up 5 and a quarter percent last evening to 30.59 Dollars. It is still down 19.5 percent since listing.

Facebook announced something different last evening. Here it is from the horse's mouth: Announcing the Social Jobs App. What is it? Well, this is the app that helps users connect with roughly 1.7 million job offerings. The Social Jobs Partnership or SJP will "make it easier for people on Facebook to find and share employment opportunities." I must say that this was perhaps a long time coming. The only downside I can see is that if you are mates with your boss on Facebook, how do you keep this a secret? I am tuned into the LinkedIn stream which suggests so and so added new skills or even better upgraded to a fully paid service. That kind of hints to me that someone is more than putting themselves out there.

Facebook. The stock that folks loved to bash after their IPO, and perhaps for all the right reasons, the pricing was just downright wrong. What the IPO did coincide with however was a massive jump in mobile user patterns and hence lower mobile revenue streams for everyone in the industry. Facebook is not alone here, Google is also having the same problems, but they will adapt, as they have been.

I remember the haters! Yo! That was my lame attempt at being hip, my cool jeans that I wore to work yesterday elicited sniggers from my colleagues who perhaps believe that I am on the cusp, age wise, of pulling that "look" off. This next piece from the BusinessInsider has something to do with that, the haters and the coolness: CHART OF THE DAY: Instagram's Runaway Growth. Everyone was outraged that Facebook bought fresh air for a monster sum. Hey, they might not have got the mobile advertising "stuff" right just yet, but they certainly knew that people wanted to take more photos and post them. Byron often says that Facebook is a gloating place. But there you go, well done Facebook.

Some news from earlier in the session, just before the US markets opened was that there were One Billion People on Facebook. One billion users a month. If you follow the link lower down, then you will see the statistics, "Since Facebook launched, we've seen: Over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009, 140.3 billion friend connections, 219 billion photos uploaded" Wow. And then some interesting user statistics, "Characteristics of users joining the week Facebook hit 1B: The median age of the user is about 22; The top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States (NOTE: in alphabetical order); and Facebook now has 600M mobile users"

Who do you trust the most? It turns out that you trust your friends more than anybody else. I have seen on my Facebook stream people asking questions and getting answers. For that I use Google, but some folks are more likely to trust their friends than the internet. I get that. So then you would not be surprised to see The Chart That Shows Why Advertisers Won't Give Up on Facebook. I hacked the chart, courtesy of Neilsen, it makes for interesting viewing:

The Zuck gave an interview yesterday. His first since the stock listed, you can catch it all here, from Techcrunch: Zuckerberg Talk Drove Facebook Stock Up 4.6% In After-Hours Trading. There is an associated video that I am trying to watch, it is rather long though. Still, I will try get to it! Clearly Mr. Market liked it!

Facebook. Something that did not exist when we started this business, Vestact. The markets gave the very first results as a listed company a big thumbs down. Unlike. The share price in after market trade sank nearly 11 percent, in normal trade the stock dropped 8.5 percent. Since listing the stock has lost nearly one third of their value. All looking rather patchy and the reason for the fall off prior to the results were weaker results and a patchier outlook from Zynga. The listing of Zynga has been, well, pretty darn awful. Zynga has lost two thirds of its value since listing in December last year. Print (a virtual print) an upside down smiley face for both, but a complete washout for Zynga.

The Facebook listing was one of those memorable listings, one of those events that you have to have watched. I was not watching because it was my daughters seventh birthday party, that was a success too! But the Faceook listing did not go off as planned. A glitch of sorts by the NASDAQ saw many a investor and folks hoping for a giant pop confused and mad with the NASDAQ. But I guess on balance, perhaps Morgan Stanley and Facebook would not feel completely happy with the outcome, but the stock listed and traded. And the Zuck got married on Saturday (our Mayvis said he is too young to get married) to long time girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. Mr and Mrs. Zuck. The Zucks. Yeah, but that actually zucks, I mean sucks, the listing technology problems. The NASDAQ say that they are embarrassed by what happened. And they (the NASDAQ) are planning to repay some investors but would need SEC approval, according to the WSJ. This was a screen grab from the Zucks weekend, see, he was busy.

Facebook has finally filed for an IPO last evening and is looking to raise five billion Dollars. Page four of the document sums up a lot of the stuff we know about Facebook, but they told us anyhow. "We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010." MAU stands for Monthly Active User. "Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011." 250 million photos uploaded every day. And wait for it, 100 billion friendships. So each user has on average 110 friends or so. Nice. And there I thought that nobody had any friends.

Drop everything, because the word on the street is that Facebook (or as a friend of mine calls it, Book of Faces) is mulling an IPO next year. Awesome! For what though? Early stages still, but the suggestion is that the company could be valued at 100 billion Dollars and that the company would look to sell 10 billion Dollars worth of shares. Go Zuck! And who said that American innovation was dead? From zero to 100 billion from a university dorm room in less than 8 and a half years, have I got that right? If of course they are going to list in the first half of next year.