Tag Archives: Facebook

Could Aviate Hurt Google?

Just when you might have been asking yourself who could hurt Google, Yahoo has just announced its acquisition of Aviate. Aviate is a company that provides contextual app search and organisation for mobile phone users. Contextual search is fast becoming the ‘big thing’ with the major tech brands with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Apple and Facebook all having contextual or search efforts in progress. So how exactly does contextual searching work?

Basically, this way of conducting a search differs from the regular search we are all familiar with on Google by trying to anticipate what you really mean or want based on cues in your past searches or in other stores of data the search tool has access to. It’s not simply about matching keywords and ranking incoming links. Aviate will organise the apps on your phone’s home screen according to its best guess at what you need to see right now. It can suggest music apps in your car, fitness apps in the gym, bringing you what you need when you need it. If, for example, you have a history of looking up stocks on your phone, Aviate can make it possible for you to wake up to a homescreen of stock quotes instead of having to scroll for an app.

Yahoo is currently working at addressing the current issue of multiple apps whereby most of us end up downloading loads of them but use only a few, as well as having to scroll through several screens of unused or irrelevant apps to get the one that you need. The future of contextual search does however, seem assured.

Such a search product is likely to sit in front of Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store by trying to locate stuff for you before you reach for those other search functions. What the competition will offer regarding similar search solutions remains to be seen but we’re in no doubt that Aviate will take off!

Pssst…Do You Want To Know A Secret?

If you haven’t yet heard of it, you may need to listen more closely as social media site Whisper.sh has taken off in a big way in the 18 months since its inception. It now boasts three billion page views a month.

The site allows users to post ‘secrets’ or thoughts anonymously, through the use of pictures with bold eye-catching quotes at the top, in a similar way to internet ‘memes’ – which are described as units for carrying cultural symbols or ideas that virally spread across the internet. Users tend to use the mobile app for an average of 20 minutes a day, checking content between 8 and 10 times a day, and are aged between 17 and 28, and the majority, around 70 percent, are female.

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, the first investor in popular photo messaging application Snapchat, is excited about Whisper’s incredible growth and invested $3 million in Whisper in April this year. “Three billion page views a month is a shockingly big number for a company only 18 months old,” Liew has claimed.

Where Whisper differs from Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, is that while these sites encourage people to post things they are proud of, like party pictures and holiday snaps, Whisper is where users go to spill the secrets they would normally only tell to a close friend. Other users can post supportive comments, and users can respond to one another. Presently, users are able to download the app free but have to pay to send messages to other users.

Do you have a secret? Shhhh….

Cryptocurrencies: Are They The New Dotcom Stocks?

Cryptocurrencies are fast becoming a buzzword, so are they becoming the new dotcom? There can’t be many of us who haven’t by now heard of Bitcoin…but what about Namecoin, Novacoin or Quarkcoin? Each of the three were up 120%, 185% and 230% respectively last week. And, the biggest mover? That was Craftcoin, up 1,557.8% in one day!

And now, there’s Worldcoin, but they’re currently only worth about 6 pence, so who knows if they’ll catch on? But then again, Worldcoin was only up 21% last week. Its market cap - the worth of the entire currency – is now $3.87m, with about 32.5 million of the coins in existence.

Bitcoin’s market cap meanwhile is about $10.7bn. They’re trading near $900 a piece and there are 12 million of them. It is currently the dominant cryptocurrency, having the first-mover advantage. But you would assume that better cryptocurrencies are bound to come along, ones that copy Bitcoin’s strengths and improve on its shortcomings. How do you know which are the good ones that will thrive? Some will have their own unique selling points. Primecoin helps discover long chains of prime numbers as a by-product of its computing. Namecoin’s supposed to reduce internet censorship. Litecoin is the next biggest after Bitcoin and Feathercoin’s had a lot of publicity.

So, where do you put your money? Cryptocurrencies, as we have previously reported, are exciting but extremely risky. Governments are a potential problem. If cryptocurrencies start to present a threat to ‘real’ currencies, you can be sure governments will fight them through regulation and taxation.

A bigger issue is that while cryptocurrencies remain anonymous, there is no customer protection or deposit insurance. Another worry is the old-fashioned pump and dump. There are more than 90 different cryptocurrencies in existence and anyone can start a currency. Once they exist, users promote them repeatedly. You often don’t know who’s behind a coin so if someone decides to pull the plug and turn the website off, there’s not a lot you can do.

Companies like Google and Facebook came after the dotcom bust. AOL was the leader before - where are they now? Could Bitcoin be the next AOL? Does the Google of cryptocurrencies even exist yet? So, what would you do with your cryptocurrency profits? Buy gold maybe?

A Tale Of Two IPOs: Twitter vs Facebook

Internet IPO’s have been big headline news recently. No one can fail to have noticed that Twitter’s initial public offering recently was completely different to the 2012 IPO of its biggest social media rival, Facebook. Twitter wanted to avoid making the same mistake of overpricing but some analysts argued that Twitter failed to raise maximum funds, adding that if it had valued its stock higher for the IPO, it could have easily raised another billion. Was the strategy of the micro-blogging site a success and does the share value and initial demand give us any clues to traders about the firm’s future? Read more…

Who Has 1 Billion Users And Is About To Overtake Facebook?

It’s not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It’s a company that most people in the West don’t know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat…Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it’s losing teen users and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year. This isn’t helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China. By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat’s users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before. And Tencent’s reach unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen is not just restricted to China. In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m. Tencent has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook which rely on mutual friend connections. With a $101bn US market cap, Tencent joins Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon among the world’s most valuable internet companies. It is looking like Tencent will overtake Facebook, although partly because China’s population is bigger and partly because it has an unfair advantage over Western competitors blocked out of the Chinese market. This needs to change. Predictions for the next few years are that Tencent will build a significant global business of great value: with products and brands we’ll increasingly come to know, interact with – and maybe even love. That’s our ten cent’s worth!

What Will You Consume With Your Morning Coffee?

Half of U.S. adult Twitter users now consume news on the platform and get news through the social media platform, mainly on mobile devices, according to a new survey. The report by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was released on Monday. The results are based on a survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults including Twitter and Facebook users.
Twitter users who consume news on the platform, defined as information about events and issues that involve more than just family or friends, represent only 8 percent of the U.S. adult population.
Almost half of all U.S. adults on Facebook use the social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg to consume news as well according to a study from the Pew Research Center released two weeks ago. But that group represents nearly one-third of all U.S. adults. Twitter has about 200 million users worldwide, while Facebook has 1 billion. The survey also underscores how young people consume news because almost half of Twitter news users are between the ages of 18 and 29. The network known for short messages of up to 140 characters is preparing to make one of the most closely watched initial public offerings later this week. It raised the price range for its IPO by 25 percent earlier on Monday, valuing the company at up to $13.6 billion…numbers that investors surely won’t have any problem consuming!

Is the Government Spying on YOU?

The current scandal over international spying that began earlier this month as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office suspected the U.S. had tapped Germany’s leader personal cell phone, might concern you more than you have realised. Giant internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, have grown angry as information now suggests that the government may have retrieved information from their high-tech facilities without their knowledge or cooperation, despite the astronomical amounts of money such companies spend on consumer protection data. The companies have been pushing back in various ways such as publishing the numbers of government requests and planning new types of encryption for their data. But will tech companies security teams guarantee user privacy in the future? Read the whole article here.

Twitter Limits IPO Valuation, Just Like Its Tweets

Twitter Inc. (TWTR) is seeking a valuation of 9.5 times 2014 sales in its Initial Public Offering next month, according to data filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, which would seem to extend the company’s economical approach of tweet characters to its stocks as well. The valuation comes 27 percent lower than the current rate of Fecebook Inc (FB) at 12.9 times 2014 sales, and 29 percent below Linked In Corp. (LNKD)’s 13.4 times 2014 sales.

The company that has popularised maxim-like short messages across the globe highlights in its relatively low valuation decision that it does not want to repeat history by following in the footsteps of Facebook, Groupon Inc. (GRPN) and Zynga Inc. (ZNGA), all of which lost more than half their value in the six months following their IPOs Twitter CEO Dick Costolo approach, in fact, has distinguished the company from its internet peers, as the filing to go public happened confidentially to avoid unnecessary hype that could drive prices up.

Twitter is planning to sell 70 million shares, which amount to a 13 percent stake, between $17 and $20 to raise about $1.4 billion, according to yesterday’s filing.

Top Tweet Of The Day? Twitter, As IPO Pegs Valuation At $11 billion

Seeking to avoid a repeat of Facebook’s much-maligned public debut, Twitter revealed more modest ambitions, saying its initial offering would raise up to $1.6 billion (987.8 GPB) and value the company at up to about $11 billion. The valuation was more conservative than the $15 billion some analysts had expected for the social media phenomenon, potentially attracting investors who might consider the money-losing company’s listing price a better deal, with room to rise. Twitter had signalled for weeks it would price its IPO modestly to avoid the sort of stock plummet that spoiled Facebook’s coming-out party. Twitter’s offering will be the most high-profile Internet IPO since Facebook’s May 2012 debut, when the social network giant’s shares fell below their offering price and did not recover until a year later. Still, the modest pricing doesn’t obscure questions about Twitter’s profitability. At a roughly $11 billion valuation, Twitter would be worth more than Yelp Inc and AOL Inc combined. Facebook’s market value is now $128 billion. Twitter may be treading more carefully than Facebook did, but there’s still plenty to tweet about!

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