I love business and technology. Formerly an engineer at General Electric, I moved to the Bay Area for a change of scene @BerkeleyHaas and to pursue a career in Technology. I'm also a fitness devotee with a new found passion for windsurfing.
Facebook has launched Graph Search, a search engine to mine the billions of friend connections, locations, likes, comments, and tags that make up its Social Graph backbone. Mark Zuckerbergmade the announcement at a media event today at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.
Facebook launches a product that is slated to redefine search. Search is now officially social. Does refining search results requires a larger and more expansing social network. Does it require expanding one's social network to the point of dilution only to improve my search results.
Interesting concept. not sure if all the answers are there..
As Facebook transitions from Silicon Valley’s hottest upstart to humdrum public technology company, the Valley’s many startup obsessives seem to be turning their attention to the younger social media company Twitter.
A research note on Twitter, weighing in at all of 416 words, sparked intense interest in the tech world today after the report’s author told Forbes that Twitter has been valued at $11 billion in some recent trades, up from $8 billion in August 2011. The company behind the research, Greencrest Capital, later said that its own internal valuation model has Twitter closer to the original, lower figure, and cautioned that the apparent surge in Twitter’s value is based on relatively illiquid secondary market trades.
But the company’s caveats couldn’t keep the $11 billion figure out of a flurry of headlines in publications ranging from tech-centric CNET to Wall Street chronicler Business Insider to Britain’s gossipy Daily Mail. Tech observers were particularly excited to hear such a bullish number from report author and noted bear Max Wolff, the Greencrest chief economist who once likened investing in Facebook stock to buying lottery tickets.
Everyday there are lives at home and on the other side of the world that go unnoticed; lives that may matter little to the personal hustle of trying to pay rent, get children to do their homework or figure out how late to leave the couch and still make it to work on time; but everyday photojournalists celebrate these lives.
From children playing while 1,034-plus bodies are pulled from the rubble of a clothing factory in Savar where shirts are sewn for wealthy westerners, to the tattered remains of an American flag on a still ravaged New Jersey coast line on the six month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy; these documentary images take us beyond a scrolling news flash on the bottom of a cable news show and ask us to look. To look and if we stop long enough to force us to stare for a moment; to question why.
Click though to The Daily Beast to see all the images for the week in pictures.
Had the pleasure of visiting Spotify in New York City over the long weekend. Young company with a very driven team focused on solving a big problem around piracy and content distribution.
Current numbers indicate 6 million paying subscribers out of a user base 24 million listeners. 83.5% of revenue is currently driven by paid subscriptions.
Cost structure
Spotify pays out the majority (approaching 70%) of revenue (advertising and subscription fees) to rights holders: artists, labels, publishers, and performing rights societies (e.g. ASCAP, BMI, etc.). In just three years since launching, Spotify has paid out over 500M USD in royalties. Shift to digital delivery of music has also lowered the record companies’ costs.
Business Model
The business model is different. Streaming is not the same as purchasing, and therefore it makes sense for each stream to generate a fraction of what a download brings in. Over time, frequently streamed tracks can earn real money, sometimes even more than sales could generate. Consider LTV vs upfront revenue stream. But how can the artists be compensated in the mean time ?
Challenges
Advertising model supports free customers but Spotify pays per stream fee
Need to scale to massive user base for Advertising to be relevant to major brands.
Make listening prominent in every location.
Differentiate value for users at the premium level (partnerships is key).
Opportunities
Carrier/Partner tie-ins: telecoms companies to sell higher-value packages to their users reduce customer churn and associate their brands with music.
Pricing: new models of subscription – daily, weekly and with different price points could help expand the market.
International: In India, music currently plays a key role in mobile operators’ customer acquisition that also own billing relationship. Consider bundled services for a daily subscription model.
Random Access Memories is full of WTF moments: Julian Casablancas delivering maybe the most emotive vocals of his career through a vocoder-style haze; dance godfather Giorgio Moroder waxing nostalgic on an electro-jazz-funk epic; pop-schmaltz guru Paul Williams (“We’ve Only Just Begun”) playing a love-starved cyborg in a disco fantasia. Then there’s the full package – a 70-minute-plus, over-the-top concept LP of prog-rocking, reverse-engineered dance music orbiting somewhere between Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Earth, Wind and Fire’s That’s the Way of the World.
The Takeaway from Warren Buffett’s Office Hours: ”Find the job you would have if you were independently rich. Associate with people you love doing what you love,” Buffett says. “How can it be any better?”
