And now for something completely different, quick takes (or what I call “blips”):
Amazon:
reported record sales of $4.89 billion, up 18%, and $177 million net profit, up 24%. Jeff is kickin’ kindle and not taking names. Which venture investor would back it today, especially with all the years of losses it had. Shows that patience is a virtue and a value.
Alibaba:
reports 150 million Alipay (PayPal-like service) users in China. That’s half of all Chinese Internet users.
Changyou:
online gaming site goes public. Yes, goes public on NASDAQ. It is growing like a weed. Most Americans know diddly yang about China. A lot of Chinese Web companies are gaining as stocks this year. Coincidentally, I pulled up a report from 1999 and it showed 6.3 million Internet users in China. Today it’s 300 million.
Facebook:
Realizes that social is more about “streaming people in realtime” than posting profile pages. Still a work in progress with clunky interface and terrible ads that have no meaning at all for 99% of users. Ads look like spam (pigs with lipstick on?). Hired a lot of Google execs, raised capital from Microsoft at a high valuation before the birds hit the turbine. Needs to get smarter about what people want and ways to deliver it through, let others customize it without going down the MySpace roll your own nightmare design route. End game? Microsoft, Google or Yahoo picks it up. If it was based overseas maybe it could go public in London, Shanghai or Berlin. NASDAQ? Maybe.
Twitter:
Raises $35 million more. Free PR on Oprah. My perspective is it’s 2% there as a company and 98% to go. Hardest part will be getting mainstream people to use it. If blogging is a time taker, micro-blogging is a voracious piranha for your time. Current service is cool but not ready for prime time in my opinion. Who really wants to follow CNN? RSS is easier and more convenient. Also doubt about “active” following…my guess is 1% or less actually read the tweets they follow.
Myspace:
Hires a new executive from Facebook to run the show as CEO. MySpace isn’t the “company du jour” as it was in 2006 but still has tons of users and News Corp. cash behind it. Don’t forget, Google paid $900 million to serve ads on it. Its two founders are out.
AOL:
Hires former Google exec to run the show. AOL’s ad platform still looks valuable to me, hard to beat its scale and it’s not just on AOL, it’s webwide. AOL is going to take a lot more work to become viable again in my opinion. The entire social web has passed it by. Ironic since AOL was built on chat in the 1990s.
eBay:
restructuring big time. Made some bad bets on Skype and stumbled with StumbleUpon. Neither had anything to do with eBay’s core business. eBay needs to acquire ecommerce firms.
Yahoo:
not moving fast enough yet. Hard to do with large companies. Needs more of a MASH unit approach than patient outclinic. BTW: MASH = mobile army surgical hospital for those of you who didn’t watch the TV show.
Google:
passed its prime? vested executives (and talent) bailing out. No longer the “media darling”. Needs to find some fresh energy again, new blood. New acquisitions that will move the needle beyond 10 on the Richter scale.
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