Facebook share price IPO – an annotated graphic

Aside from a salutary lesson in investing in something intangible, in something that doesn’t actually exist – i.e. investing in digital “air” – the continuing slide of Facebook’s share price is also an illuminating glimpse in to the nefarious world of high finance, wherein the efficacy or otherwise of your product or service is almost an irrelevance, its future prosperity and stability inexorably tied to the whims and proclivities of a worldwide network of financially cavalier gamblers.

Ah well, Zuckerberg has had a pretty good ride thus far and still isn’t short of a few quid today, regardless of having had billions wiped of his personal notional dollar value, so them’s the brokes.

Click on the graphic for an expanded  view.

Facebook share price slump

Facebook IPO – an annotated graphic

Far be it from us to comment on the true value of Facebook – it being one of those baffling interweb phenomena that doesn’t actually output any kind of tangible product and will almost certainly be considerably less significant in 5-10 years’ time –  but as its much-anticipated IPO draws near, it seemed an opportune moment to reflect on the big numbers attached to a company that has the world’s investors frothing at the mouth for a piece of the action.

Our mild cynicism and detached bemusement aside, a company the size of Facebook apparently having a debt of “Zero” is quietly impressive.

If you’re interested in other Facebook-related news, you might enjoy E&T‘s news story about how Facebook’s new Timeline feature is going to be a big part of your life shortly. Whether you like it or not – ha! Yep, that’s the arrogant “charm” of Facebook in a nutshell right there. Enjoy!

Click on the graphic for an expanded view.

Facebook IPO fact file

Coming to a screen near you: ‘eEnders’?

David Cameron’s vision of a Silicon Valley-style technology hub in London’s Shoreditch district shows spunkiness. Whether the commercial property agents struggling to let empty office space further east in Docklands will share the PM’s enthusiam, however, has yet to be seen.
Local coffee shops with E1 and E2 postcodes should be happy, though, according to the BBC’s ever-insightful technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones: “The start-up crowd, sipping cappuccinos in Shoreditch cafes, has been given a wake-up call from the very highest levels of government,” he blogs
Hats off, meanwhile, to HCL Technologies’ director Bindi Bhullar, who has been fast off the mark to coin the tag ‘eEnd’ to describe the proposed regeneration. “We should all be looking forward to ‘the eEnd’ putting the UK on the world map for technology innovation,” Bhullar declares.
A TV series entitled ‘eEnders’ that combines elements of Channel 4’s ‘The IT Crowd’ and BBC-1’s top soap, must surely already be bubbling away in some programme planner’s mind.

TDSS: the malignant ‘heart’ of cyber crime

Antivirus champion Kaspersky Lab describes the TDSS malware as the ‘most powerful and complex rootkit to date’. It infects drivers, which ensures that it will be launched almost immediately the operating system is started. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to detect and remove this rootkit. TDSS is spread via an affiliate program: affiliates earn money according to the number of computers they infect; the highest payment is made for machines located in the US. Botnets managed using TDSS, and consisting of approx. 20,000 infected machines, are sold on the black market. The botnets’ command and control centers are located in China, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Holland, and Russia, Kaspersky Lab reports: it estimates that around 3 million computers have been infected by the rootkit. Check-out this excellent and accessible article by Kaspersky Lab boffins Sergey Golovanov and Vyacheslav Rusakov, that looks at the technologies implemented in TDSS, the way in which the rootkit spreads, and how cyber criminals profit from this malware, that provides an engaging insight into how this pesky code inveigles its way onto our unsuspecting PCs.

ISP plans for 50%+ World Cup online traffic spikes

Early group matches indicate that the 2010 FIFA World Cup could generate the highest online traffic in the UK of any event to date, according to data centre Internet traffic stats from business ISP Star; indeed come the England versus Slovenia joust on 23 June unprepared ISPs (and their customers) could experience more than a wee bit of contention of their own. Read the full E&T story here.

‘The Pleasure Telephone’: proto pay-per-listen service, 1895-1926

No, not one of those compact devices designed to give one an initmate sensual tingle when an incoming call arrives on your mobile… ‘The Pleasure Telephone’ is a 45-minute long BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature documentary about the ‘Electrophone’, a patented 19th Century technology that used early the telephone network to relay entertainment to subscribers.

Opera was to have an honoured place in entertainment-by-telephone history – Covent Garden performances could be accessed live in private homes, gentlemen’s clubs and hotels. In the USA, subscribers were ‘taught’ operas by an interweaving of spoken libretto and recordings of arias. The Pleasure Telephone also looks at the breadth of entertainment offered via the telephone by companies in the UK, Hungary, France and the USA. In London, for example, the Electrophone company offered a range of West End productions to subscribers – including via coin-in-the-slot machines. There was also live worship on offer from prominent churches…

You can catch the programme on Listen Again until next Friday 21 May.

Corporate PR ‘will eat social media’

More from the gossipy nooks of the Social Media World Forum, this time about social media and its effect on corporate PR. Many savvy brands (those big enough to be able to afford it) are setting up social media monitoring initiatives to keep watch on what socmed is saying about them…. Intermediated coverage on blogs or Twitter is causing social net monitoring teams to jump at any mentions that are either negative or even damn with faint praise.
Because it is often unbudgeted for, social media monitoring is being done on the cheap, managed by unexperienced personnel who are prone to overreaction. A trickle of negative references is deemed a ‘Toyota moment’…
The fight-back is on. Savvy PRs are now target ‘influential’ bloggers with the usual tricks of their trade – gifts, goody bags, lavish meals, and other hospitality, expenses-paid trips…
Later that evening the PRs lay their traps:
Those SOB bloggers may think that they’re bigshots for now… But we’ll soon have ‘em eating out of our lunch bag…
The whisper here is that many PRs see bloggers as a ‘soft nut’ to crack – a much softer target than pesky journalists.

Beatles [no longer] for sale

Pop quiz, hot shot: how much will a close-to-near-mint copy of The Beatles’ first long-playing record, Please Please Me, set you back?

The Beatles Please Please Me stereo LP, 1963 first pressing

We’re talking first UK pressing, stereo copy, heavyweight shiny black vinyl, gold and black Parlophone labels (PCS 3042), Dick James songwriting credits, glossy front laminated flip-back sleeve printed by Ernest J Day, Angus McBean photo credit printed in the far bottom right corner on the front, vinyl matrix stamps YEX 94-1 and 95-1, vinyl stampers G1 and R1, MTZ tax code embossed on side two label and supplied with the original polythene-lined “Use Emitex” inner sleeve.

So how much is it likely to set you back? According to this recent transaction on a well-known auction web site, quite the pretty penny.  [JW]

Supine tigers, gaping maws

Thomas ‘Ecademy’ Power is back, bringing a welcome voice of experience and caution to the gung-ho geekery permeating the Social Media World Forum. As enterprises gush and rush to embrace Twitter to drive core sales, Facebook to build critical customer communities, and LinkedIn to consolidate valued B2B relationships (and find key staff to recruit) how many CIOs consider the fact that all that irreplaceable data that they are basing so much sales and marketing activitiy on does not actually belong to them? It belongs to yer Twitters, Facebooks, YouTubes, LinkedIns, etc.  And as they -the socnet platforms – introduce new ways to monetize their own propositions, how long before the social network providers start to charge for the privilidge of using their services?
“What happen when FaceBook and co start talking directly to your customers, to your clients?” asks Power. “And what happens when FaceBook becomes a bank, a credit card, an online retailer – becomes a predator?” [JH]

Match wits with the Friday Puzzle

We like the Richard Wiseman brain-bending puzzles over on his blog. It’s the Friday Puzzle today and it’s one with a mathematical bent. Go on, give your brain a five-minute mental workout (or less, depending on how sharp you’re feeling – me, I need a banana right now as my energy flags). [JW]