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Is AirBnB Becoming the eBay of Vacation Rentals?

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

The global apartment sharing startup AirBnB has raised $112 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, confirming rumors about the fast-growing company which books rooms, apartments and houses in destinations from New York to San Francisco to Hawaii to London to Paris to Barcelona to Buenos Aires.  The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (AH).  Reports are that Andreessen invested $60 million; another $40 million came from DST; $5 million from General Catalyst, and the rest from earlier investors and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.  The round is the second for the San Francisco-based company, bringing its total amount raised to date to $119.8 million.  The firm lets people travel to places more affordably by letting them book places to sleep from people around the world.  AirBnB plans to use the capital to fund its worldwide growth of private properties, often at amazingly low prices.

“Over the past three years, we’ve built a community marketplace for unique properties and brought it into the mainstream and into almost every country on the planet,” said Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of AirBnB.  “Today is a watershed moment – both for AirBnB as a company and for our community – that will enable us to touch new markets and expand our vision to make the world’s most interesting and inspiring places accessible to our users.”

At present, AirBnB has more than two million nights booked, more than double its rate of bookings just four months ago.  Its website receives more than 30 million hits per month and the number of AirBnB social connections has tripled to 54 million since the feature launched in May.  AirBnB has the capacity to rent properties by the night, owned by real people in 16,702 cities in 186 countries.

“We started realizing there is a growing trend of people who are doing this and making a living on Airbnb,” said Chesky, who founded the company in 2008 with Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk.  “That’s what turned this into a movement and tipped it into the mainstream.”

AirBnB tries to prevent bad behavior on the part of the host or visitor by allowing people to post ratings and reviews of both hosts and travelers on their website, similar to eBay.  Users who connect to the site via Facebook can see if they and a potential guest or host have any mutual friends or a shared alma mater.  The site lets hosts ask for a deposit to cover damage or other problems.  To use the AirBnB website, visitors search for listings in the location they want to visit.  Once they have found the preferred location, they send a message to the host with any questions about the room or its location.  Next, users pay for their stay using a credit card or PayPal.  AirBnB holds the money until the day after the guests check in, assuring that the hosts are not cheated out of their cash.  The site profits by charging a transaction fee for each reservation.

When a young Toronto woman’s roommate moved out, she decided to rent out her extra bedrooms to travelers. The service has unexpectedly made her a bed-and-breakfast owner, bringing in approximately $1,800 a month, a nice cushion as she works on starting her own business.  “It pays my rent with a little left over,” she said.  “I’ve been able to upgrade my place, paint and get new furniture, which in turn means I can charge more.”

“The AirBnB movement has changed the way people experience the world,” Gebbia said.  “This investment will help us respond to increasing international demand by accelerating hiring, and the opening of offices around the world, in order to support our growing community on more local levels.”

On the Forbes website, Nicole Perlroth says that “Venture firms have been salivating to get a piece of AirBnB for months.  Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson famously referred to AirBnB as the one that got away. Other investors have been falling all over themselves trying to back AirBnB copycats for office space, tutoring, cars and even, experiences. The round, pricey as it may be for a three-year-old startup, is still coup for the VCs involved.  Andreessen-Horowitz initiated talks with AirBnB about a potential investment long before Jordan joined the firm last month.  (Andreessen-Horowitz’s newest partner Jeff) Jordan, a former eBay executive, says he was eager to lead the deal for AH because ‘(AirBnB) reminded me more of eBay in its early days than any other business I had seen.’”

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Craig Wortmann on Being an Entrepreneur

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Virtually anyone can be an entrepreneur, although starting one’s own business is a giant leap.  Many people look at becoming an entrepreneur as a cause and effect – the academic term being “causal logic”.  That may not be the optimal way to view entrepreneurship, however.  Rather, the world’s most successful entrepreneurs use effectual logic.  According to Craig Wortmann, Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “It goes like this:  I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got this idea, I’ve got this limited set of resources and I’m just going to begin, and I’m not exactly sure what the effect will be.”  Wortmann has more than 20 years of experience in entrepreneurial sales and marketing strategy experience.

According to Wortmann, this is a powerful way to think about entrepreneurship because the concept has such an underlying vibe of optimism.  This notion of entrepreneurship is just start the business, anyone can do it.  They are all personality types; they don’t have to be deep in domain knowledge.  Anyone can start a business.  The research suggests that as long as people are not rigid about reaching a certain outcome, they will be successful.

Wortmann asks budding entrepreneurs to think about the idea they have and ask what is the relative value to the idea.  He believes that many people get stuck as entrepreneurs because they say “I can’t be an entrepreneur because I don’t have the next Google.  I’m not waking up in the middle of the night with the next idea for Facebook.”  Any idea that will change the focus of people or get them to do something better or a bit different – you have a potential business.

Would-be entrepreneurs need to begin taking action.  They need to talk to potential customers and partners, and start to formulate a product or service to offer to people.  Chances are the fledgling entrepreneur will be rejected; there is no question about that.  But if they keep embracing that chaos and making contact with the market, things will begin to take shape.  They need to get out there and realize that they are the structure and the process.

The challenge for entrepreneurs can be maintaining momentum.  If it’s the product, stay close to the product.  If it’s the people, get out into the market, meet people and maintain energy.  According to Wortmann, “One of the things I like to talk to students about:  is shutting down a business failure?  It is in a way, but we’re all on a journey and that’s just a chapter.  In a microcosm, it is a failure.  But is it really a failure if you take those lessons and start something new or go back to a big company and leverage all those things you learned?  That looks like success to me.”

To listen to Craig Wortmann’s full interview on entrepreneurship, click here.

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Is the Timing Right for a Facebook IPO?

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Facebook is contemplating the idea raising about $10 billion in an IPO that would value the predominant social-networking website at more than $100 billion.  At $10 billion, the offering would raise significantly more money than any other technology IPO, and Facebook expects investors to be eager to buy into the social-networking company.  The IPO would overshadow that of the previous record holder, Infineon Technologies AG, which generated $5.23 billion in its 1999 debut.  Agere Systems Inc., which raised $4.14 billion in 2000, currently occupies second place.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old founder and CEO, will undoubtedly be rewarded by the website’s rise.  A valuation of $100 billion will further increase Zuckerberg’s net worth which had earlier been estimated at $17 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Facebook expects federal regulators to call for the firm to disclose its financial results by April 30, 2012 — if it doesn’t go public sooner.  Facebook chose to wait until next year to launch its IPO to give CEO Mark Zuckerberg extra time to add users and increase sales.  Facebook, which has a staggering 800 million users, is also increasing its focus on mobile technology, aiming to leverage the shift to smart phones and tablets.  The firm expects its next billion users to connect primarily via mobile devices, rather than desktop computers.

Zuckerberg noted that an IPO isn’t something he has spent “a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about.  We’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and in a liquid way.  Now, the promise isn’t that we’re going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon.  The promise is that we’re going to build this company so that it’s great over the long term.  And that we’re always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we’ll do that.

Writing in the New York Times’ “Deal Book” column, Steven M. Davidoff isn’t certain that this is the correct time for a Facebook IPO.  “Facebook is in a corner.  Another Internet hotshot, Groupon, is trading below its offering price, and the market for internet initial public offerings over all appears to be deflating.  The European sovereign debt crisis isn’t helping the market gloom.  The coming months are shaping up to be a bad time to undertake an IPO.  Still, Facebook will almost certainly have to go public during this time whether it wants to or not — and whether or not it can get a valuation of $100 billion or more in doing so.  And it’s partly Facebook’s fault — it just has too many shareholders.  Securities regulation requires a United States company with 500 or more shareholders of record to begin filing reports, including audited financial information, with the Securities and Exchange Commission four months after the year it exceeds this threshold.  Facebook most likely exceeded 500 shareholders this year.  By the end of April 2012, it will become subject to this heightened regulation and have to disclose a spate of confidential business information.”

What does the prospect of an IPO mean to potential investors? TechCrunch writer Josh Constine wasn’t optimistic in a post bluntly titled “Why Greedy Stockholders and a $100 Billion IPO Could Hurt Facebook.” Constine says that if Facebook becomes subject to the desire of its stockholders, the site will innovate less by making profit a higher priority than user experience.  For example, more ads are likely to pop up on users’ pages.  “Outside stockholders could detract from Facebook’s vision and momentum,” he wrote.  “They could push for faster returns, and pressure the company to display more ads, turn mobile into a direct revenue stream, and play it safe with product.  This might produce short-term gains, but could hamper what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has built into a core communications utility for the world.”

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Google+ Off to a Good Start – Will It Last?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Just one month into its launch, Google+ has seen extraordinary growth, netting some 20 million unique visitors.  Still, it faces several key challenges before it can become the dominant force in social media.  Online metrics company ComScore said that of the 20 million users, five million of those are from the United States.  “Google+ is on an unprecedented growth trajectory over its first three weeks, reaching 20 million visitors faster than any site in recent memory,” Comscore Vice President Andrew Lipsman said.  The estimate comes a week after Google CEO Larry Page said that the company already had accumulated 10 million registered users. While registered users and unique visitors are not necessarily the same thing, that growth has been nothing short of impressive.

While the rate of growth is unparalleled, the social network is still small when compared with its rivals such as Facebook and Twitter, which have 750 million and 200 million registered users, respectively.  Google+’s success will depend on how Google “converts this strong trial base into regular users,” Lipsman warned.  While competitors Facebook and Twitter have become online destinations in themselves; more than 50 percent of traffic coming to Google+ is initiated by visits to Google or Gmail, according to Experian HitWise.  YouTube is a significant referrer.

Writing on the DVice website, Raymond Wong says that “Google+, the new guy on the social networking scene isn’t doing too bad.  After Google CEO Larry Page announced last week that Google+ had 10 million users in a mere two weeks, it appears they’ve added another 10 million users.  Talk about being the hottest thing in town.  People said that Google couldn’t build a social network that anybody would give two cents about, but somehow they’ve managed to do just that.  According to an independent comScore report, the new Google+ social network has hit 20 million unique visitors in three weeks.  Some have called Google+ a Facebook rip-off.  Some have joined simply to see what the buzz is all about, much like how everybody started Google and for a brief moment in time and then disappeared into oblivion. For now, none of that matters.  Google+ is gaining more users everyday, and Google is sure to be super excited by all the signups.”

“So while we have a lot of work still to do, we are really excited about our progress with Google+,” Page said, noting that Google will re-focus on its core products and on new innovations.  “Google+ is also a great example of another focus of mine — beautiful products that are simple and intuitive to use and was actually was one of the first products to contain our new visual redesign.”  Google+ isn’t Google’s first expedition into the world of social media and its excitement over having 20 million Google+ users may be early.  Google introduced Google Buzz in February 2010 and immediately saw user numbers swell; it was later panned.

Reports are that Google will, unlike Facebook, host games on its own servers — this could make them faster and less prone to glitches.  The Google+ code mentions a gaming platform, and the company has reportedly invested as much as $200 million in the leading social gaming company Zynga.  There has been no official announcement about if and when the Google game platform will launch or how it will be designed.

Facebook is still beating Google+ in time spent on a social network.  HitWise research director Heather Dougherty said the average visit time for Google+ is five minutes and 50 seconds, compared with almost 22 minutes on Facebook.  Dougherty also examined how users arrived at Google+.  Google.com (at 34 percent) and Gmail (at 26 percent) account for 50 percent of all traffic to Google+; another six percent come from YouTube and Google Profiles.  Facebook ranked third among websites visited immediately prior to Google+, an indication that many social-network users have multiple accounts.  Google+ ranks as the 42nd most visited social networking site in the United States, and was the 638th most visited website.  Broken down by region, most of Google+ visitors are from Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco (in descending order).

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Facebook Is Worth $50 Billion? Anyone Remember the Dotcom Bubble?

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Could social media be the victim of the next dot.com bubble? Although Facebook has been valued at $50 billion – more than Yahoo!, eBay, and Time Warner and butting heads with such giants as Amazon and Google, there is some question about what the valuation is based on.  According to Newsweek, “Some media experts have compared Facebook with Disney, valued at about $70 billion.  But Disney has real, tangible assets – parks, hotels, cruise ships, iconic images to market on everything from T-shirts to tableware, and a massive library of classic animated films – to back its assessed value.  Facebook has a virtual network that, according to Time, links one-twelfth of the world’s population.  However, according to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook still has enormous infrastructure costs that include as much as $700 million for two data centers, and its profits have yet to be publicly disclosed.  When an investor buys a piece of Facebook, what exactly does that investor get?  The sudden, meteoric explosion in value of online social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is eerily reminiscent of the rise about 15 years ago of the online businesses that created the ‘dotcom bubble.’”

On the PBS Newshour,  Ray Suarez interviewed Josh Bernoff, a senior vice president of Forrester Research, who has written two books on social media.  According to Bernoff, “I certainly think that there’s no rational way to understand these valuations.  I want to be clear here.  Social is very exciting.  There’s a lot of business perspective, a lot of optimism that goes along with it.  But I think these valuations are based on where people think the next buyer will come from and not on where the actual revenues of these companies are going.”  Earlier this year, Microsoft bought Skype for $6.5 billion, although its revenues are less than $1 billion a year.  When LinkedIn went public, it was valued at $9 billion.  Its profits are just $12 million annually.

According to Experience:  The Blog “The dot-com crash of 2000 was devastating.  Even now, 11 years later, the NASDAQ Composite is just a hair over half of where it stood in March 2000.  The crash caused the loss of $5 trillion in market value, huge numbers of people lost their jobs, and the facade of most of those dot-com millionaires crumbled as their paper wealth evaporated.  (To me, the insanity of the dot-com craze is demonstrated by a single story told to me by a now-successful exec in a social enterprise company.  Back in 2000, he ran a tiny startup that got caught up in the dot-com hysteria; at one point it hit a market cap of $1 billion but was generating just $60,000 of revenue.)  I am taking you on this trip down Memory Lane for a reason:  It’s happening again.  Investors in social media startups are looking to cash in, and valuations are soaring despite modest to no profits.  Recently, Airbnb, a site that allows people to arrange short-term vacation rentals of rooms, homes and apartments, received a round of funding based on a $1 billion valuation.  While the company has not released financials, best guess estimates are that Airbnb only generates around $10 million of revenue.  To put this into perspective, Marriott has $12 billion in revenue and a market cap of $14 billion.”

The Next Web disagrees with predictions of a second dotcom bubble.  “Dotcom 2.0 is much stronger than its predecessor.  People are more technologically savvy and, crucially, broadband and smart phones are approaching ubiquity.  The world is switched-on, tuned-in and can’t get enough Internet.  Technological advances aside, the one thing that will ensure we don’t see another dotcom disaster is social media marketing.  The key to success this time lies in finding ways to monetize the many ventures – it’s understood that driving traffic isn’t enough, which is why Twitter is actively seeking ways to drive its revenue.  In fact, Twitter may make as much as $150 million this year, according to some reports.  There’s no question there are a lot of over-valued companies out there at the moment; some will undoubtedly crumble and some will flourish. But Dotcom 2.0 isn’t a bubble, and it won’t burst.”

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Is a Dot.Berlin Internet Domain In Our Future?

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

The dot.com era is moving on.  Websites will soon be able to end with anything from “.shop” to “.canon” after the group that manages Internet addresses approved the historic change.  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which until previously allowed just 22 suffixes including “.com” and “.org,” will accept almost any word in any language.  The move could prevent cybersquatting, the practice of registering domain names and selling them to trademark owners, often for big bucks.  Big business may have to buy addresses to prevent their brands from being hijacked, which costs $500,000 per company, according to an estimate from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.

“Today’s decision will usher in a new Internet age,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors, said in the statement.  “We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.”  Applications for custom suffixes, which will cost $185,000, are not inexpensive and the first of these “top level domain names” won’t go live until the end of next year, said Adrian Kinderis, a member of Icann’s advisory council.  Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi Ltd., are some of the companies that are interested in company domain names, while generic names will be auctioned to the highest bidders, Kinderis said.

“Icann has opened the internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer for ICANN.  “No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.”  There is the possibility that several hundred new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) will be created, which could include such addresses as .google, .coke, or even .BBC.  At present, there are just 22 gTLDs, as well as approximately 250 country-level domain names such as .uk or .de.  According to industry analysts, it’s a price that global giants might be willing to pay to maximize their internet presence.  The money will cover costs incurred by ICANN in developing the new gTLDs and using experts to scrutinize the thousands of expected applications.

Companies and organizations that want one of the new gTLDs will have to meet high technical standards, according to Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT, a domain registry service.  “You need IT robustness and you need intellectual property protections beyond what is available in the dot com space.  You have to have 24/7 abuse team.  You have to have mechanisms where a trademark holder has first right to get their name,” he said.  The higher standards, Tonkin said, translate to an extremely rigorous application process.  “Using a real estate analogy, it would be roughly the equivalent of getting approval to build a skyscraper.”

Japanese electronics giant, Canon, plans to apply for rights to use domain names ending with dot-canon.  Berlin, Germany, has expressed interest in a dot.berlin suffix.  Other suffixes could organize the Internet by language, geography or industry.  According to Brad White, ICANN’s director of global media affairs, opening the Internet address system will have far-reaching social and commercial impact.  “It will afford a possibility for innovation, creativity, branding and marketing.  We can’t fully predict the impact that this change will have, but we know it will have tremendous impact, in much the same way that nobody could predict social media.  Nobody could predict the popularity of Skype.  No one could predict the popularity of Facebook or Twitter. What we have done is removed a barrier to innovation,” White said.  “One of the biggest changes that this will mean to the Internet is an expansion of the use of non-Latin characters.  So, people who speak Cyrillic, or Arabic or Chinese can now use their own generic top-level domains at the end of an Internet address.  It will vastly, we believe, increase the number of Internet users.”

“Brands need to act now if they want to apply for one of these new domain names as it is not as simple as registering a .com address. ICANN’s application fee is $185,000 USD and the application process is complex, requiring a submission which will run into hundreds of pages. Many companies will engage with a specialist to help them apply and manage their new TLD,” said Theo Harakis, chief executive of Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services.  Sebastian Bachollet, an ICANN board member, expresses confidence with the decision.  “Some people feel that the new gTLDs will cause confusion…I trust we have the tools to ensure the phase of stress will be brief,” Bachollet said.

ICANN’s announcement that it is setting aside $2 million to help developing countries is little consolation for the pay-to-play nature of the process.  According to ICANN, it expects as many as a thousand applications, mostly from recognized companies and brands.  Eric Mack in PC World says that “It appears that the greatest expansion of the domain name system is a big win for big business, amounting to the digital codification of today’s corporate giants.  But won’t it seem a little silly if, in five years, Canon, is part of a merger or undergoes a name change, or disappears from our lexicon for some other reason — and one of the world’s newest domain endings becomes worthless overnight?”

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Potential Facebook IPO Could Value Company at $100 Billion

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Facebook is likely to file for an initial public offering (IPO) as early as October or November that could value the popular social networking site at more than a whopping $100 billion.   Goldman Sachs is the top candidate to manage the lucrative offering, which could come in the 1st quarter of 2012.  Facebook, whose chief operating officer last month called an IPO “inevitable,” made no comment on the report.

The company’s IPO likely would probably be prompted by a section of the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act known as “the 500 rule” At heart, the rule mandates that once a private company has more than 500 investors, it must release quarterly financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, just as public companies do.  Facebook, which is likely to cross the 500-investor threshold this year, would probably launch a formal IPO in advance of a public-company reporting obligation that would be required next April.  Another factor motivating the IPO, according to people familiar with the plans, is Facebook’s wish to increase employee compensation.  Early in 2010, Facebook curbed employees’ ability to sell their company shares privately to other investors — a move that may now be prompting employees to quit Facebook so they can monetize their shares.  If the company goes public, however, employees will be able to sell their stock on the open market, allowing them to cash in on their holdings.

“Unable to sell their private shares, Facebook employees are growing restless,” according to Kate Kelly at CNBC.   “An initial public offering is expected.  A factor in the company’s IPO timing is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s requirement that some companies like Facebook must disclose financial information if they have more than 500 private investors.”  The IPO speculation and record high valuation is comes on the heels of recent numbers showing declining user-ship in some of Facebook’s leading markets.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Shira Ovide says that “Facebook is on track to exceed $2 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for 2011.  That’s even higher than the expected 2011 profit circulated in the early part of the year when Goldman Sachs and Russian investment house Digital Sky Technologies invested in Facebook at a $50 billion valuation.  If Facebook ends the year with $2 billion in Ebitda, would IPO investors stomach a 50 times trailing multiple valuation?  Seems bubble-like.  Trust us.  Wall Street bankers, lawyers, P.R. mavens, caterers and everyone else are slobbering for a slice of the Facebook IPO magic.  Facebook has been meeting with potential bankers that want to shepherd the IPO.  Goldman Sachs is thought to have an inside track to lead the IPO thanks to its recent investment in Facebook, but don’t count out big banks such as J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, which have led recent big tech IPOs.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been non-committal about an IPO for a long time.  As recently as December, Zuckerberg gave his weird deer-in-headlights stare when ’60 Minutes’ asked him whether he would ever push his baby into the public markets.  ‘Maybe’ was Zuckerberg’s answer.  But momentum is taking over.”

Not so fast, says Fortune magazine’s Dan Primack. According to Primack, “Pay attention to news that Facebook is planning its IPO.  But take its proposed valuation with a grain of salt.  First, the most recent private trades of Facebook stock came in at around $85 billion, and private trades are meant to be done at a discount to public valuations.  LinkedIn shares, for example, traded at $23 per share on the private markets six months before going public at $45 per share.  At that velocity, Facebook actually would be valued at $165 billion next January.  More importantly, it’s impossible to intelligently speculate on an Internet company valuation 6-10 months out.  Will the bubble still be inflating?  Will it have popped?  Will macro trends have continued their anemic recovery, or double-dipped back down?  Facebook is probably immune to the timing issues related to IPO windows, but it does not stand apart from the economy at large.  If we experience a massive advertising pullback, for example, then Facebook could take a hit in its largest revenue pot (or at least a growth slowdown).  Not saying that will happen, but obviously it could.  To me, the only value in today’s ‘$100 billion’ report is in referring back to it when the company has an actual public valuation.”

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Facebook May Breach the Great Firewall of China

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Social networking could gain 1.3 billion new users if a deal goes through that will introduce Facebook to China.  Facebook Inc. has signed an agreement with Baidu, Inc.  a search engine company, to create a social-networking website in China.  “We are currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers,” Palo Alto, CA- based Facebook said.

The arrangement follows several recent meetings in China between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li.  The Baidu website would not be incorporated with Facebook’s international service, and a potential launch date is “not confirmed.”  Facebook said it is “currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers.”  By entering the Chinese market, where the world’s most popular social-networking service is currently banned, Facebook would gain access to the nation’s nearly 500 million Internet users.

According to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of MSNBC Business Insider, “The deal makes sense for both sides. On Facebook’s side, it needs a big local partner to break into the huge Chinese market. On Baidu’s side, it is threatened by social network juggernaut Tencent, and it might be a safer bet to build a social network with one of the most successful social companies in the world than to try to build its own.”

Baidu, which is China’s largest search engine, wants to provide more social networking opportunities in China.  The impediment has been the Chinese State, which owns the “Great Firewall of China” and has blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Google removed its search engine last year.

Writing on the website Digital Trend, Molly McHugh is curious about how Facebook can compete if it enters the Chinese market.  “Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, when riots in the country’s Xinjiang region led to severe crackdowns on Internet use.  Since then, statements from Chinese officials and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have hinted at the possibility of cooperation between the two, if a compromise between the nation’s overbearing censorship and Facebook’s ‘openness’ can be reached.  Now it looks as though something is going on.  What exactly that may be is still up in the air, but numerous reports say Facebook is working with China to come up with a solution.

“According to Marbridge Consulting, as well as a few blogs,” according to McHugh, “a post on Sina Weibo from Hu Yan Ping, the founder of a Chinese market research firm claims that Facebook will be collaborating with Baidu to build an entirely new social networking site.  Ping wrote, ‘Facebook really is about to enter China, the agreement is signed.  A domestic website will work with Facebook to create a new site.  This new site is not interlinked with Facebook.com.  The question is, will this live or die in China?’”

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Yahoo! Planning a New Corporate Home

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Yahoo wins approval for a new corporate campus in Santa Clara, CA. Advance planning has put the heavily trafficked Internet destination and online media company Yahoo! in a sound position to develop a planned 3,000,000 SF campus in a high-profile location in Santa Clara, CA.  Yahoo! purchased the 48-acre site in 2006 – well before the financial crisis and increased competition from Google and Facebook.  Although no construction start date has been announced, Yahoo!’s plans have won the approval of the Santa Clara City Council, which certified the environmental impact report and the development agreement.

Currently based in Sunnyvale, CA, Yahoo! plans to develop 13 six-story office and R&D buildings; three two-story common buildings; and two levels of underground parking at the site.  When completed, the campus will accommodate as many as 12,000 employees.  According to Yahoo!, the development would consolidate its employees and facilities in a Silicon Valley region with “high corporate visibility”.  The development agreement gives Yahoo! the authority to build at the site for as long as 20 years.

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Will the iPad Make Laptops Obsolete?

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Will iPad put the PC to pasture? Does the introduction of Apple’s new iPad sound the death knell for laptop computers?  The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Technology columnist Walt Mossberg’s test drive of an iPad has him believing that the new product has “the potential to change portable computing as we know it.”  During the test drive, Mossberg used his laptops only 20 percent of the time, because he found the iPad to be extremely user friendly and significantly lighter in weight.

According to Mossberg, “If people see the iPad mainly as an extra device to carry around, it will likely have limited appeal.  If, however, they see it as a way to replace heavier, bulkier computers much of the time – for Web surfing, email, social-networking, video- and photo-viewing, gaming, music and even some light content creation – it could be a game changer the way Apple’s iPhone has been.”  Weaknesses include the inability to write and edit long documents or view Adobe Flash videos, which the iPad doesn’t support.

Based priced at $499 and topping out at $829, the iPad “is thinner and lighter than any netbook or laptop I’ve seen,” Mossberg says.  “It weighs just 1.5 pounds, and its aluminum and glass body mere a mere half-inch thick.  It boasts a big, bright color 9.7-inch screen that occupies most of the front.  As on all Apple portable devices, the battery is sealed in and non replaceable.  It has a decent speaker, and even a tiny microphone.”

Mossberg concludes:  “All in all, however, the iPad is an advance in making more sophisticated computing possible via a simple touch interface on a slender, light device.  Only time will tell if it’s a real challenger to the laptop and netbook.”

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