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Comparing public user engagement suggests that Google+ is still a niche pursuit, despite Google claiming it has 170 million people signed up - while Pinterest's attraction remains high
Away from all the hubbub over that other social network, how is Google+ - described by Larry Page and others as the new "social spine" of the company - doing?
As far as user numbers go, swimmingly: Page said that it has crossed the 100 million user mark. In April, Vic Gundotra said that "More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+". That's a lot. That's more than Twitter claims as monthly active users (140 million).
But as far as user engagement goes, previous studies have said that it's not a hit. What we don't know is how many of those 170 million are active users of Google+ in the past 30 days. The suspicion, because Google has been evasive, is that the answer is: not many at all.
• The average Google+ post has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.
• 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one. Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again.
• Among users who make publicly-viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post
• A cohort analysis reveals that, after a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily. This trend is not improving in newer cohorts.
The obvious question to ask of that analysis - which, as a caveat, is only made against public posts (because private posts are, well, private, and there's no way of knowing how many of them there are) - is how it compares against other social networks, partciularly Facebook, Twitter and the new kid on the block, Pinterest.
Note too that these are averages. There will be significant extremes; this is unlikely to be a normal curve. Most likely at one end there is a colossal number who don't do anything (and whose engagement may have been minimal - and perhaps nonexistent), while at the other is Robert Scoble, who never stops.
That would suggest the likely distribution of Google+ users is bathtub-shaped - high at both ends, very low in the middle. Because the people who like it really like it, as with any social network.
So how high are the ends and the middle?
Analysing the sides
The Google+ data analysing 40,000 randomly-chosen users, from RJMetrics, says that the chances are good that someone will make a second post - 70%. But, says Robert Moore, the author of the post, "after that, Google Plus does not perform as well as other social services that we have analysed. In charts like these, we typically expect to see the probability of repeat posts shoot up to well north of 90% by the time the user has made several posts. This is basically the 'once you're using it you're hooked' principle."
But instead, he says, "with Google Plus, this number never crosses the 90% mark. Even after having made five such posts, the chance of making a sixth is only 85%. That means that 15% of people who have made five posts never came back to make a sixth."
It's possible of course that the sixth is made privately - but it seems counterintuitive for someone to post publicly five times in a row and then shift entirely to private sharing.
Moore also notes that Google+ users "are less and less likely to make additional posts even a few months after initially joining."
In other words, Google+ just isn't sticky. Or, alternatively, it's attracting people who start and then go "periscope down".
But is this a pattern that's common to social networks? Not at all, he says, and contrasts it with Pinterest - which recently won an investment round valuing it at over $1bn.
Pinterest: pinteresting
RJMetrics did a similar analysis against Pinterest in February, and found completely different behaviour. "Pinterest's traffic charts aren't hockey sticks - they're rocket ships," Moore noted then.
It found that Pinterest was retaining and engaging users two to three times more efficiently than Twitter had been at a similar stage in its history. Over 80% of "pins" were re-pins from elsewhere on the site, indicating a lot of viral activity. (For Twitter at the same age, only 1.4% of tweets were retweets.)
But it was the user engagement that was surprising. By breaking people down into cohorts based on the months in which they joined, it could follow how active they were – with the expectation that they would drift away and become less active. But instead, the older cohort remained just as active.
"This either means that no one who starts using Pinterest ever stops or – more likely – that users who continue to use Pinterest become so much more engaged over time that their activities fully make up for those of any users who leave," Moore noted.
Of course a key point about Pinterest compared to Google+ is that Google's nascent social network is much larger, so you might not expect the same level of excitement on average. Another potential factor is that many new joiners are in effect co-opted in via their Gmail account, which "upgrades" them to Google+ whether they particularly want to or not. That's always going to degrade the level of user interaction compared to something that people actively choose to join.
But Pinterest users look like a determined bunch. "Between 40% and 60% of [Pinterest] users are still actively pinning even as far out as week 8," notes Moore. "This may seem like a steep dropoff, but for a consumer internet business it's exceptionally good."
And then, Twitter
And for comparison, he goes back to a Twitter analysis he did in 2009 - when the service was just three years old. I did ask Moore whether there have been any more recent analyses of Twitter; he doesn't (though might run one now).
What he found then was that Twitter decay rate - how many unique tweeters were still at it 8 weeks ahead - was down around the 20-22% mark. And also: "Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%." And: "If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user." Remember that this was back in 2009, when it was still part of a comparatively tiny demographic, and by his estimate had about 49 million accounts. Now that's up to 140 million, according to Twitter's release earlier this week.
But here's his conclusion on Pinterest in February: "Pinterest demonstrates some of the strongest user engagement, retention, and virality metrics I have ever seen in an online business. The company has found tremendous success among its core demographic".
OK, and now how about Google+? Less good. In fact all the metrics are less good (apart from the user numbers). On average, a user waits 15 days between making their first public post and making their second. This number declines with each subsequent post, but not drastically. There is an average of 10 days between a user's fifth and sixth public posts.
But we've already brought up the caveat about public posts, and it's entirely possible that some people make their first post in public, but after that restrict themselves to private posts, or keep posting with a constant frequency but only make their posts public occasionally. (One challenge is that it's hard, if you're a Google+ user who's in someone's circle to which they post, to know whether that post is public or not. So Google+ users themselves aren't in a great position to know this.)
Next, Moore looks at the much more public face of Google+: +1s, replies and sharing. He writes:
Of all the categories, we feel that this is the least likely to be biased by the fact that we only studied public posts. These public posts will still be visible to each member's private networks, and actually could attract +1s, shares, and replies from external users as well. If anything, we would expect our numbers here to be higher than in the general population.
Nope. From 70,000 posts, he gets • an average of 0.77 +1s per post (or, put another way, out of 10 posts, 3 won't even get the equivalent of a Facebook "Like")
• an average of 0.54 replies per post (ie, about 1 reply per two posts - no wonder people don't post; it's unrewarding)
• an average of 0.17 re-shares per post (or slightly less than 1 in 5)
I asked Moore what, of all the data about Google+, he found the most remarkable. "It's not the absence of activity that we find noteworthy here, but the drop-off," he responded. "You can speculate on the reasons why people stop posting publicly (in certain cases maybe it was a behavioural change from wanting to post publicly to wanting to post privately), but the drop-off is so consistent across the population we studied that we speculate there may be an underlying drop-off in overall activity."
He added: "I would not expect our stats on likes, +1s, and re-shares to be biased downward. Activities like these on public posts are just as visible to private circles and also can be acted upon by members of the public."
In a statement to Fast Company, which saw the study early, Google said: "By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we've said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately - you don't have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world."
On the plus side, pun intended, the company has clearly rethought how people may want to share and they have learned. Google+ is basically what Google Buzz should have been. However, unlike its predecessor, there's no easy way for consumers to pull in content from other networks - at least for now.
However, at least where we sit today, I believe that Google+ will leave consumers nonplussed - e.g. bewildered. While the interface is terrific and Circles and Hangouts both offer a strong value proposition, Google+ doesn't solve a consumer problem that Facebook already hasn't - or soon will - solve.
• Facebook breaks even in first day of trading • IPO smashes record for trading volume with 565m shares • Underwriters step in to shore up $38 offer price • Launch delayed amid confusion at Nasdaq • Follow our Facebook shareholder wealth tracker here
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST:Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We'll be live blogging the day's events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google's initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It's Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman's were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that's more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn't got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people "liked" or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined "friend" and "like". Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
8.30am ET/1.30pm BST:Mark Zuckerberg will ring the bell for the opening of the Nasdaq stock market at 9.30am as he kicks off a share sale that will value the company at $104bn.
We'll be live blogging the day's events here in New York, and you can see how the fortunes of Zuckerberg and the social network crew rise (or fall).
Not since Google's initial public offering (IPO) has a share sale been as closely watched. It's Super Bowl for social media: every commentator in the land has an opinion on whether the firm is really worth that sort of cash, and is lining up to share it.
At $104bn, Facebook is being valued at more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs. Last year Facebook had revenues of $3.7bn. Goldman's were 10 times that.
But this is a company with massive potential. Facebook will have more than a billion people logging in to its service this year – that's more than three times the populations of the US – and it hasn't got started in China. Nearly 400 million people log on six days a week. In the first three months of this year those people "liked" or commented on Facebook items 3.2bn times a day.
Google added a verb to the lexicon; Facebook redefined "friend" and "like". Now Zuckerberg has to find a way to make his social network live up to its massive promise.
8.52am ET/1.52pm BST:Trading action on Facebook shares is not likely to commence until 10:30am ET at the earliest, as bankers work through the mechanics of the offer, market sources said.
9.13am ET/2.13pm BST: The delayed debut of Facebook stock this morning affords us time for a walk down memory lane... back to 2004, when FB chief Mark Zuckerberg was still just a cocky college student bragging about his hacking exploits in instant messages to friends.
Zuckerberg appears to confirm in one message that he secretly hacked into the website of the Harvard University newspaper, the Crimson, by guessing the emails and passwords of two people in the college database.
"So I want to read what they said about me before the article came out and after I complained," he told a friend. "So I'm just like trying the email/passwords of everyone who put that they're in the Crimson. I wonder if the school tracks stuff like that."
In another message, Zuckerberg boasts about deactivating college students' accounts on the internal Harvard social network, ConnectU. "I got bored so I started deactivating accounts on ConnectU haha," the future cyber-grandee writes.
9.23am ET/2.23pm BST: CNBC, which is tracking the Facebook IPO, is reporting on the overnight "hackathon" at the company's Menlo Park, California, campus. In the run-up to today's big splash, employees spent the night at their place of work writing computer code, over-caffeinating and giving their eyes a little extra practice staring at computer screens. The event reflects the company's youthful, creative, spontaneous, creative culture.
Employees ordered Chinese food and there was talk of them making a run to In-n-Out Burger, CNBC reports. How does the news change your bet on what Facebook stock will do today? Let us know in the comments.
9.28am ET/2.28pm BST:Hackathon Update. It turns out there was one Facebook face who declined to participate in last night's ritual of camamaderie and computer fun. Zuckerberg apparently called it a night early in the evening, Josh Halliday reports. He went home to his girlfriend Cilla and their Hungarian sheepdog, Beast.
When you're the boss you get to do that.
9.30am ET/2.30pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg has just rung the bell opening the Nasdaq market. He did so from a stage at the company's Menlo Park HQ. Then he hugged COO Sheryl Sandberg. The stage is full of other FB execs, with a sea of employees all around. A boom camera is capturing the action in the cheering, waving crowd. Looks like Bonnaroo. "A Woodstock event," someone on CNBC just called it.
9.39am: The scene at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park in the run-up to the IPO. The company is valued at $104 billion as shares go on sale to the public.
9.36am ET/2.36pm BST: The Guardian's Dominic Rushe has been talking to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect – the only book written so far with Facebook's cooperation – and a man who has spent many many hours with Mark Zuckerberg.
"His impact on the world will be as least as big as Bill Gates and probably already has been," Kirkpatrick tells Rushe. "Like Gates I'm positive he is going to end up being one of the world's great philanthropists. I believe he has a very strong social conscience."
He says this will be a big day for Zuckerberg but that while the Facebook boss may party later, he'll try to keep things as normal as possible once he has rung the bell.
Then the real work begins...
"I spoke to Peter Thiel [Silicon Valley investment legend and one of Facebook's early backers] and he said Facebook had this peculiar quality, it will either completely dominate or it will completely go away. I don't think it's going away anytime soon though."
Fitzpatrick predicts that Zuckerberg could soon be the world's richest man.
10.10am ET/3.10pm BST: Facebook is summoning great spectacle in its rollout this morning – but will the stock price hold up? When the excitement dies, will the company warrant its $104 billion valuation, and the $38 share price?
One main place investors locate value in Facebook is its potential power as an advertiser. With 900 million users and counting – and a potentially vast market in China still waiting to be tapped – Facebook has an unparalleled capacity to put ads in front of eyes.
But earlier this week, US auto manufacturer GM decided that those ads weren't worth it, ending its Facebook campaign. The company had been spending $10 million a year to advertise on the site, but none of the reports measuring those ads' profitability came back positive. The Economist spoke with Chris Perry, marketing chief for GM's brand Chevrolet, who confirmed that "a routine marketing review concluded that the site delivered 'insufficient' results.
Companies still believe that Facebook is an indispensable tool for spreading buzz about new products, however:
That viewpoint was echoed by the senior media buyer at a major Detroit ad agency, who asked not to be identified by name because he is not authorised to discuss strategy with the press. Based on clicks-throughs alone, he says, Facebook "doesn't pay off." His agency's approach is to use the service as part of broader social media campaigns.
10.21am ET/3.21pm BST: Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin came in for a drubbing last week when it was revealed that he had disclaimed US citizenship in favor of residence in Singapore, which does not have a capital gains tax. Saverin responded to the criticism by saying that his move was not a tax dodge; he simply prefers Singapore.
Last night Saverin set the controversy aside to offer his former colleagues a hearty congratulations on his personal Facebook page. He misspelled his co-founder's name – but it's the thought that counts?
On the eve of the Facebook public float, 8-plus years in the making, I as co-founder wanted to look back and cherish Facebook's early beginning. Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg [sic] on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.
10.37am ET/3.37pm BST: A major status update for the Facebook cofounder: as Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell to open the Nasdaq exchange, his account automatically spread the news.
Zuckerberg tagged fellow executives Chris Cox, vice president of product; the chief finance officer David Ebersman; the vice president of finance Cipora Herman; and his trusted No 2, Sheryl Sandberg.
10.46am ET/3.46pm BST: Facebook as a growing concern. Whatever happens with the stock price today, the immense market draw of the company is plain to see in a chart tracking users, from about 300 million in March 2009 to 900 million today (blue is all Internet users worldwide; brown/gray is FB users):
10.42am ET/ 3.42pm BST: T-minus three minutes and counting: Nasdaq has just announced that trading in Facebook shares will begin at 10.45am ET.
11.02am ET/4.02pm BST: Reuters is reporting that the opening of trading has been pushed back a bit:
RT @ProducerMatthew: Reuters: Facebook IPO extended by additional 5 minutes, to trade at 11:05 AM ET - NASDAQ
11.23am ET/4.23pm BST: Nasdaq has announced that there has been a delay in the start of Facebook trading. We're reaching out to sources at Nasdaq to find out more about the holdup.
The latest delay is the third or fourth of the morning. Nasdaq itself puts out time call information. Meaning the market itself is failing to predict when the market will go to work.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that traders are having problems changing or canceling their orders ahead of the Facebook IPO.
Will Zuckerberg have to change his status again?
11.27am ET/4.27pm BST:IPO delayed indefinitely by glitch in market: This isn't the headline Facebook was looking for this morning.
Wow, Nasdaq found the only way possible to upstage the Facebook IPO.
11.30am ET/4.30 pm BST: Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues ringing the opening bell for Nasdaq at 9.30am ET.
Looks anticlimactic now.
11.30am ET/4.30pm BST:And they're off. Facebook is now on sale – and the first shares cross at $42.05, a good deal higher than the $38/share rollout price.
For the time being, at least, the company has 100 billion reasons to cheer.
11.34am ET/4.34pm BST: How big is trader interest in Facebook? 82 million shares were traded in the first 30 seconds, according to Nasdaq.
11.36am ET/4.36pm BST: How will Facebook shares perform in the first day of trading? Tell us what you think.
For extra credit, let us know in the comments what you think the high price and the low price of the day will be.
11.50am ET/4.50pm BST: As the Facebook share price settles back to $38, The Guardian's Nils Pratley contributes his analysis of the pricing dynamics. If the stock goes too high, insiders who sold in advance of the IPO may resent the investment bank. A share price of around $41 would satisfy most everyone, Pratley writes:
A 10% pop should satisfy the IPO advisers. When you start getting to 20%-plus, the insiders who are selling feel short-changed and accuse the investment bank advisers of misjudging demand. 10% is ok - it meets the "leave something on the table for the next person" rule.
11.56am ET/4.56pm BST: A look back at the hot tech IPO of 20 years ago:
Celebrating Facebook IPO today while reflecting on AOL IPO 20 years ago. Valuation was $70 million. Most thought Internet was a fad. #wrong
12.03pm ET/5.03pm BST: One stock that really doesn't like what it's seeing in the Facebook IPO: Zynga, the Internet gaming company.
Zynga, which depends on Facebook for a platform for its games, had an underwhelming IPO of its own in December, when it fell 5 percent in its first day of trading.
UPDATE 12.07pm ET: Trading in Zynga shares has now been halted.
12.18pm ET/5.18pm BST:Facebook stock has been out of the gate for 50 minutes. After opening at just above $42 the stock dropped to the break-even level of $38. But instead of continuing to fall, the stock staged a resolute recovery:
So what happened? Here's Dominic Rushe:
Facebook's shares came dangerously close to falling below $38, the offer price, and have now rallied. This chart shows what happened. The speculation is that the underwriters have piled in and supported the price that we are chasing now. If it's true, they can't support the price forever and you can expect FB's shares to fall next week.
But – and it's a big but – there have clearly been problems with the IPO at Nasdaq, orders for shares were backed up and may have caused these weird price movements.
There are however signs that investors are underwhelmed. Zynga shares were suspended after they crashed this morning – not a good sign as the game firm is largely dependent on Facebook for its business.
12.34pm ET/5.34pm BST: Have underwriters stepped in to hold Facebook shares above $38?
"It strongly appears that there's a huge perma-bid at $38 on Facebook," Joe Weisenthal writes. "Check out the big mass of yellow on the left column... all those bids at $38."
12.39pm ET/5.39pm BST: If you don't own Facebook shares yet, are you currently missing an historic opportunity to get in on the ground level of a company that's about to break all previous records for stock growth?
Warren Buffett apparently doesn't think so. Here's what the Oracle of Omaha has to say about IPOs in general:
It's almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).
12.55pm ET/5.55pm BST:Facebook staffers have flocked to the social network to bask in the post-IPO glow, the Guardian's Josh Halliday reports.
Lindsey Cochran, who works in marketing at Facebook, writes: "I vividly remember signing up for facebook in the upstairs quad of 508 Thurston ... in April of 2004. I can't believe I am now going to be a part of such a historic moment. Feeling incredibly lucky!"
Gabe Hernandez, another staffer, says: "While I won't be in any of the Facebook offices to celebrate today, I am wearing my hoodie in solidarity. Thanks everyone for making my job far from the last place I ever want to be. Now stay focused and keep hacking!"
Meanwhile, Zuck has returned to his Facebook to note: "This is a pretty awesome hack."
1.09pm ET/6.09pm BST: Till death do us part – or your company doth go public. Will the Facebook IPO cause a spike in shareholder divorces as new millionaires are created and relationships become more liquid, as it were? The Financial Times has a morbidly droll (and paywall-protected) report:
"When Google went public, there was a wave of divorces. When Cisco went public there was a wave of divorces," says Steve Cone, a divorce attorney based in Palo Alto, near the social network's Menlo Park headquarters. "I expect a similar wave shortly after Facebook goes public."
1.16pm ET/6.16pm BST: Dominic Rushe checks in on the Internet gaming company Zynga, and what the poor performance of its stock today could mean for Facebook:
Facebook's shares have recovered after dropping worryingly close to their $38 offer price. But over at Zynga there are still problems.
As we mentioned earlier, it looks likely that Facebook's battalion of bankers moved to make sure FB didn't drop below $38. Zynga had no such luck and was down more than 13% at one point. It's now down nearly 6%.
Zynga is basically a way to trade Facebook, since nearly all of its business comes from the social network. So is this what FB's share fall would look like if the bankers hadn't piled in? Just sayin'.
1.22pm ET/6.22pm BST: Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur looks at what's next for Facebook:
What to expect now? Don't be surprised if the next big thing is a Facebook phone – running its own software and developed from top to bottom to involve you in the site all the time.
Zuckerberg's team has been advised to do this directly, because it needs to reach the "next billion" internet users, and they are mainly going to be using mobile phones, not desktop or laptop computers. Selling its own phone would mean it could make itself the background hum of many peoples' lives everywhere – and show adverts and collect data on its own terms.
1.55pm ET/6.55pm BST: Bloomberg reports that Facebook underwritersdid in fact start buying shares at $38 to keep the stock from falling below its offer price:
Facebook Inc. (FB) underwriters purchased the company's stock to keep it from falling below $38 a share after debuting on the Nasdaq Stock Market, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The bankers supported the stock after Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ) faced difficulties delivering trade execution messages after the initial public offering, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the transactions are private.
1.42pm ET/6.42pm BST: If you haven't checked out our live tracker of top Facebook shareholders' wealth based on today's fluctuations in the FB share price, you can have a look here. For the record, Mark Zuckerberg is currently "worth" more than $20 billio
2.59pm ET/7.59pm BST: One person we haven't heard a lot from today is Sheryl Sandberg – but expect that to change. Here's Dominic Rushe:
Sandberg is one of the most impressive execs in the US with a resume that includes the US Treasury, Google and McKinsey. You can read my profile of her here.
Sandberg was late to the Facebook party; she joined in 2007 when Zuckerberg poached her from Google. Back then Facebook had 70m users and no profits. How things change. She holds 1.9m shares and has made a small fortune today.
Sandberg stands to make a far larger fortune in the near future. She has 39m restricted stock units, most of which are tied to performance targets. If she hits them – and history suggests she will – Sandberg will become a billionaire, which is a rarity for employees. That kind of reward usually goes to the founders, not the help.
2.52pm ET/7.52pm BST: Dominic Rushe places the Facebook stock performance in the context of the lackluster Nasdaq showing this week:
"OK I admit it. I've had a bit of a downer on Facebook at $100bn plus. It's an amazing company but I just don't think it's proven worthy of that kind of valuation yet. And maybe bankers are propping the share price up.
"Even so, today's performance needs to be set against what has been happening to the rest of the Nasdaq companies this week. One look at this graph of the Nasdaq over the last five days shows, this wasn't an easy week to launch."
3.02pm ET/8.02pm BST: With an hour to go until the Nasdaq close, Facebook's shares are at $39 a share and Mark Zuckerberg has outpaced several of the world's richest men.
With wealth of over $21bn, Zuckerberg is now worth more than Jeff Bezos at Amazon or either of the Google founders, according to the Forbes list of billionaires. He was briefly richer than New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, but has now just slipped behind B's $22bn pile. Poor thing.
3.20pm ET/8.20pm BST: Has the Facebook IPO been a success? With 45 minutes to go until the closing bell, the stock is slowly sinking from around the $40/share range back to its opening price of $38. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a party that fizzled:
At 11:30, the stock opened at $42, jumped up to $43, fell back $42—and kept falling, back to $40. "For market sentiment, this is not going to be positive," said Simon Hobbs, the network's resident Brit. Melissa Lee was equally crestfallen: "Forty minutes ago, I don't think anybody thought $40," she said. David Faber had been working the phones, and he reported that his sources had told him the stock might well fall below the issue price of $38, which would be a big embarrassment to the banks underwriting the deal, led by Morgan Stanley. "The big story is that Facebook, the social network, is now a public company," he said. "The smaller story is that after five minutes, it's only up six per cent."
Henry Blodget, in contrast, congratulates the investment banks for rolling out a stock that was "perfectly priced":
This price level was ideal for almost everyone involved--with the exception of short-term traders who bought the stock only to instantly flip it. (And no one should cry for them).
With such a modest pop, Facebook and its selling shareholders did not leave tens or hundreds of millions (or even billions) of dollars on the table--an expensive mistake that most companies make.
When LinkedIn went public, for example, the bankers underpriced the deal, and the company needlessly handed $100+ million to institutional investors.
Heidi N. Moore has been arguing that the failure of the stock to lift and hold above its initial offer price of $38 is making for a "rocky" debut.
What you're not seeing right now is 33 banks all seeking to blame each other for why this stock is barely clinging to a decent open. $$ FB
3.26pm ET/8.26pm BST: Here's a eye-catching list from Heidi N. Moore, comparing Facebook to other big companies in terms of market value and revenue. She calls the list "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others: Facebook Edition."
At $40/share, Facebook ranks 6 out of 10 in terms of market value ($112bn).
Guess where Facebook ranks in terms of revenue?
Google: Market value $200 billion; 2011 revenue $37.9 billion JP Morgan Chase: Market value $127 billion; 2011 revenue $99.8 billion Verizon: Market value $117 billion; 2011 revenue $110.9 billion Merck: Market value $115 billion; 2011 sales $48 billion GlaxoSmithKline: $112 billion; 2011 sales $44 billion Facebook: Market value $112 billion; 2011 revenue $3.7 billion Anheuser-Busch: Market value $111 billion; 2011 revenue $39 billion PepsiCo: Market value $109 billion; 2011 revenue $66.5 billion McDonald's: Market value $91 billion; 2011 revenue $27 billion Cisco Systems: Market value $89 billion; 2011 sales $10.4 billion
3.41pm ET/8.41pm BST:Facebook stock on the day of its IPO after four hours of trading: $38.
3.50pm ET/8.50pm BST: Facebook shares seem to be trying their hardest to sink below the $38 offer price. The underwriting banks are in the market to shore up that price. And they're dealing with a lot of volume: record volume, in fact.
4.00pm ET/9pm BST: And the close: Facebook shares end their first day of trading at $38.23 – up 23 cents a share on record volume.
4.06pm ET/9.06pm BST: Here's what the last hour of trading looked like for Facebook. Down to $38 and then flat, flat, flat. It's almost as if there was an artificial floor holding it there.
4.10pm ET/9.10pm BST: It's hard to see how the headlines now aren't hard on Facebook. The market didn't want the stock at that price.
Some schadenfreude on Twitter:
Currently lol'ing at the people who thought $FB would close at > $60 today.
4.50pm ET/9.50pm BST: The Securities and Exchange Commission announces that it will investigate what caused the delay this morning in the Facebook rollout, CNBC is reporting. The regulator will look into why it apparently was that not all traders had the same information at the expected time.
4.55pm ET/9.55pm BST: We're going to wrap up our live blog coverage of the Facebook IPO. It wasn't the fireworks display some investors expected to see.
This morning market watchers were discussing whether Facebook would post double-digit gains in its first day. Precedents such as LinkedIn, which jumped 107 percent in its May 2011 IPO, made it seem possible that Facebook could hit $50 or higher.
It has been a tough week for the markets in general – the worst week for stocks in all of 2012 so far, in fact. The Dow dropped 450 points this week, or 3.5 percent. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 were both down.
But the spectacle of the underwriting banks that set Facebook's offer price of $38 having to buy shares for the final hour of trading to shore up that price made the offering feel flat.
Here's a summary of what happened:
• Facebook ended the day virtually even. The stock opened at $38. The stock closed at $38.23 (up .61 percent).
• The company shattered the record for IPO volume, with 565 million shares changing hands. GM held the previous IPO volume record with 458 million shares.
• Because of a Nasdaq glitch, in which traders were unable to get confirmation of their trades early in the day, the IPO was rolled out about a half-hour later than expected. The first Facebook shares traded at 11.30am ET. The SEC has announced it is investigating.
• At today's valuation, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook fortune tops $20 bn.
Legal LOLs as the LJ and QC turn MCs, plus three-year-old turns Dave Grohl in our rundown of the top online clips
It's been a dramatic few weeks at the Leveson inquiry into press standards, with evidence from Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. The Poke website has mashed those appearances into a hip-hop extravaganza that also stars Sienna Miller, Kelvin MacKenzie, Steve Coogan and more. Most have their voices auto-tuned almost beyond recognition – although James Murdoch sounds surprisingly unchanged. Let's hope Leveson himself doesn't watch it and decide it's time to clamp down on the intermet.
Finally, there's a couple on a car journey playing what looks at first like a cruel trick on their three-year-old by whacking on Nirvana at full volume. The kid's reaction is a surprise. But is it all a setup? You decide...
Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and chopped around by Dugald.
1Leveson: the Musical Cameron should watch this on his mobile – or is he too busy texting?
Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 1000 on 18 May 2012. The Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately 2m blogs, as well as Facebook and Twitter.
Tom Midlane is covering the north's huge festival of ideas for the Guardian Northerner. He's halfway through - and reeling with mind-expanding notions, new technology and a Buddhist urban meditation app
A mecca for creatives, media professionals and tech-geeks, FutureEverything has ballooned from modest origins into an internationally-acclaimed festival of ideas to rank alongside the likes of TEDx and SXSW. This year's conference focuses on mass experience and participatory culture, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Mass Observation movement.
The twitterati are out in force at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, and it's nice to be at a conference where you don't feel self-conscious tapping on your laptop, since at least half the audience is swiping away on their iPads or feverishly tweeting their thoughts.
The breakfast session begins with a presentation by Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the urban meditation app Buddhify. Having first explored Buddhist practice when working in Manchester, Gunatillake is a firm believer in the idea that Buddhism is compatible with city living. This is Buddhism as filtered through modern marketing, with the jargon to boot – there's lots of talk of Buddhism as an "industry of awakening" and an "innovation tradition", as well as a desire to tackle Buddhism's "pathological" attitude to money.
Gunatillake is an engaging performer though, casting Buddhism as "a punk movement of spiritual practitioners", with Buddha as a proto-scientist using "inner technologies" to explore the nature of human experience and the mechanics of suffering. He's particularly interesting in charting the migration of Buddhist practice, from austere and scholarly south-Asian Buddhism, moving east through China, Korea and Japan (zen), and on to Tibet. The hippies then brought Buddhism to the baby-boomers and creating a "western meditative tradition".
He brings the timeline up-to-date with the birth of the "hipster meditator", a postmodern Buddhist influenced by all three Buddhist traditions, as well as the science on the neurological effect of meditation and consumerism. As Gunatillake puts it:
It's not about looking to the East, to the mountaintop in India or the zen garden in Japan or a monastery in Burma, it's about making it work here.
And there's plenty of evidence to show there are people doing exactly that, with groups like buddhistgeeks, an online community dedicated to modern Buddhist practitioners, and the #OMCru (that's Online Meditation Crew for the uninitiated, a group who encourage meditation through Twitter) and Gunatillake's own Buddhify app (tagline: "Modern meditation. To go.") It's even spreading to the corporate sector, with Google encouraging their employees to read Search Inside Yourself in a bid to improve their wellbeing and productivity.
There's an interesting panel discussion on the relevance and future of Mass Observation, hosted by Fiona Courage, Special Collections Librarian & Mass Observation Archive Curator at University of Sussex. There's a flurry of debate over the worth of social media as a historical archive – technology writer Bill Thompson claims Twitter and Facebook are self-aggrandising mediums, whereas the original Mass Observation came from a sense of public-spiritedness.
Nevertheless, Campbell tells us that he has saved his texts of the late 1990s into a database, goading us:
When the history of the text message is written, it'll be me, because you've all deleted them!
Pauline McAdam, senior broadcast journalist for BBC Radio Merseyside, raises gasps of horror from the technophile audience when she describes social media as "cave painting but digital", lacking the magic of archives, before suggesting: "Just shut up and have a cup of tea!"
Next up is Moritz Stefaner, a data visualisation expert with a very Keatsian focus (he styles himself as a "Truth and beauty operator"). Entitled Weltbilder (German for "world views"), Stefaner's talk looks at how data visualisation helps us live in a complex world, giving us a birds-eye perspective on all kinds of worlds: finance, knowledge, relationships.
Some of his data works are stunning – beautiful tendrils sculpted from the data in Wikipedia page deletion discussions (including one on "Biscuits and human sexuality"). Stefaner talks of "the tension between order and chaos" and cites a natural correlation between the elegant solution in mathematics and beauty, quoting inventor Buckminster Fuller approvingly:
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I'm finished, if it's not beautiful, I know it's wrong.
As well as discussing his work on the OECD Better Life Index, the Max Planck institute and a mail-order museli company, he gives us a peek of Emoto – an attempt to visualise in real-time the global emotional response as medals are lost and won at the London 2012 Olympics using all the social media data.
There's a real diversity to the presentations at FutureEverything this year. There's the BBC on their staggering quantity of digital coverage planned for London 2012, and a presentation from Adrian Hon, the brains behind Zombies, Run – a zombie-themed running app which features stories penned by Orange prizewinning novelist Naomi Alderman. He also shares the irresistible fact that apparently zombies tend to become more popular during socioeconomic downturns. Elsewhere composer Andrea Molino discusses Three Mile Island, his multimedia opera based on the work of an Austrian meteorologist who analysed the wind data after a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979.
There's only so much innovation you can take in one day though, which perhaps explains the surprisingly small audience for Richard Ayers, Head of Digital at Manchester City FC, who's here to talk about tribalism in football. The first shock is that he's not actually a big football fan. Ayers discusses the volley of abuse he received after an ill-advised "Bluffer's guide to being a City fan" was posted on the official City website. I also keep particularly quiet when he mentioned receiving a savaging from the Guardian's very own Scott Murray.
Ayers is persuasive in discussing modern football's need for endless expansion because the financials are so cock-eyed, with clubs spending recklessly on transfer fees and wages. I also loved his discussion of football clubs as having 'characters' – Arsenal are, apparently, a starchy gent, while City are "a mysterious beauty who ensnared many lovers". After last Sunday's antics at Eastlands, I think there's plenty of Mancunians in sky-blue who would agree.
Tom Midlane is a freelance journalist based in the north-west. He has written for Leeds Guide and DeHavilland, the parliamentary monitoring service, and is a regular contributor to Manchester-based news site Mancunian Matters. His blog is here and you can also contact him on Twitter @goldenlatrine
It's like this: The browser's doomed, beÂcause apps are the fuÂture. Wait! Apps are doomed beÂcause HTML5 is the fuÂture. I see someÂthing alÂmost every day sayÂing one or the other. Only it's mostly wrong.
Keep this in mind for a little lower down. Read Bray's post first, though.
One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging W3C specification inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.
France's data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.
The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.
France's information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet "totally satisfied" with Google's explanation of the amendments.
Evans works for Enders Analysis. Here's a little bit from his latest report:
Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:
Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.
Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.
By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web -- about 10% more than last year.
Ahonen isn't very happy about what's happening to Nokia. (He used to work there.) Also has calculations for smartphone installed base by platform, which puts Android top at 328m, then Symbian (299m) and iOS (178m) from a total of just over 1bn.
And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it's just that developers don't think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it's really just a vicious cycle where developers don't put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn't support developers.
Isn't it more likely that the developers evaluate the opportunity cost of each platform, and cut their cloth accordingly? If they don't find it worthwhile to test, say, Temple Run on 1,000+ devices, that's not their "fault". It's their rational judgement of investment return. If you can't make money, you won't spend money. It's the classic bootstrap challenge of every ecosystem. (Thanks @beardyweirdy666 for the link.)
We've gathered together some key and outspoken experts in the field to debate the issues.
Martha Lane Fox is the UK's Digital Champion and a leading English businesswoman and charity trustee.
She co-founded holiday retailer lastminute.com and grant-giving trust Antigone, and is NED to M&S, MyDeco.com and Cabinet Office's Efficiency and Reform Board. She is also the Chair of Go ON UK as well as the Government's Digital Advisory Board.
John Kao is an author and prominent US strategic advisor. He is currently chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation and contributing editor at the Daily Beast.
The self-styled 'innovation activist' is renowned for his creativity and was an advisor to Hillary Clinton during her Senate re-election campaign in 2006.
Larry Elliott is the Guardian's economics editor and has been with the paper since 1988.
He has authored or co-authored four books, most recently The Gods that Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets has Cost us Our Future, with Dan Atkinson
The event will be moderated by
Simon Rogers, who edits the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore
What do you think our panel should discuss? What is the key data and solutions you want to see?
Just give us your questions in the comments field below.
While tens of thousands of cases had transferred from the CSCS system to the CS2 system, the correct arrears balance did not transfer with them. This was because the information had been archived and, on transfer to CS2, these balances were not picked up by the system, the NAO [National Audit Office] said. In addition, a number of cases managed off the primary IT systems, on a separate clerical case database, did not have opening arrears balances entered onto that database. In compiling the accounts the commission has estimated that this would have led to an understatement of the overall arrears balance by £59m at 31 March 2011.
That's £59m owed to parents. Real people affected by real mistakes.
A great read, but important too for understanding why some parts of the internet are weak for fact-checking:
If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.
Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.
The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.
The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.
Amazing graphs. The number of devices, screens and resolutions is boggling.
Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that--two words.
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It's why we've been working on an intelligent model--in geek-speak, a "graph"--that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.
Google is in effect moving to the semantic web. It's a huge move. Our take here.
Being wildly successful in tech is about anticipating change, and altering the status quo; being the 14th chief executive of a stodgy old major tech company is about extracting as much value as you can from the success it's already had. The CEOs of the Time Warners and Sonys and Yahoos and RIMs and even Microsofts of the world are experts only on their respective companies' existing businesses. They say things that sound stupid to us because they're not us, and because their goal for tech (to maximize profits at their companies) is not the same as ours (to get more awesome stuff that makes our lives better). They're not even really talking to us. They're talking to their boards.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new strategy will accompany the launch of Android 5.0 - to be known as Jelly Bean, in keeping with Google's sweet tooth for Android code names - and involves several Android vendors. Several devices, including both tablets and unlocked smartphones, will be sold directly through Google's Web site and through some unnamed retail partners.
Retail partners could be interesting (does it just mean "Amazon"?) Selling devices through Google's own site worked so well for the original Nexus One that Google dropped it within four months. It said: "The web store.. remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it's clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from." Anything changed since May 2010? (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)
[Sprint CEO Dan] Hesse pointed shareholders to other benefits of the iPhone, noting that the device helped provide protection against litigation over Google Inc.'s Android operating software and allowed it to trim a costly loyalty program put in place to prevent customers from leaving for other carriers offering the device. Sprint activated 3.3m iPhones over the past two quarters, compared with 11.9m at AT&T Inc. and 7.5m at Verizon Wireless.
"If you have any doubt go look at T-Mobile's net subscriber numbers," Hesse told shareholders. T-Mobile USA is the only major carrier without a deal to carry the iPhone and has lost contract customers in 10 straight quarters.
Sprint doesn't expect its iPhone investment to pay off before 2015. Even so it seems to think it better than T-Mobile's position. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)
Thailand reportedly also looked at some of China's largest tablet manufacturers, such as Lenovo and Huawei, but the pricing per unit was too high for its budget. Conversely, a lower bid from another company was offered but rejected by the government, perhaps due to less specs for the value.
The select device model, priced at $81 per unit, is the Scopad SP0712: An 7-inch Android device running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. It's also got 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, 1.5 GHz single core CPU, and comes in four color options: Red, blue, silver, and gold. Shenzhen Scope will also set 30 help centers around the Southeast Asian country to provide user support specifically for tablets received from the campaign. Not too shabby of specs for tablets for elementary school students.
Now consider what those childrens' reaction will be to a standard PC when they're older. (Thanks @undersinged for the link.)
The sale will likely generate billions, but hidden just beneath the buzz are signs that not all is well for Silicon Valley's star
On Friday, Facebook will finally become a public company. The hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) will be the largest tech company share sale ever and is expected to value the social network at over $100bn – more than the combined value of Nike and Goldman Sachs.
But not everyone is cheering Facebook on. Ahead of the sale of the century, here are five signals that suggest there may be choppy days ahead for Facebook's investors.
A lot of smart guys just decided to sell
Facebook's early investors are some of the most successful in Silicon Valley, and on Wednesday a lot of them decided to dump a lot more shares.
The social network giant announced Wednesday it was upping the number of shares it will offer in the IPO to 421.2m from 337.4m. The sale is now expected to value the firm at over $100bn – making it the biggest ever tech company IPO.
The company said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, would not be selling more shares. But Peter Thiel, the famed Silicon Valley investor, will now be selling 16.8m shares, up from 7.7m shares.
Goldman Sachs more than doubled its planned share sale to 28.7m from the 13.2m the investment bank had initially planned to sell.
Tiger Global, a hedge fund, will sell to 23.4m from 3.4m. Tiger's head, Charles "Chase" Coleman III, earned an estimated $500m last year and is an expert in making money out of IPOs.
GM just gave them the boot
General Motors, one of the world's biggest advertisers, said this week that it was pulling its ads off Facebook.
The car firm is keeping its Facebook pages, which are free, but decided that its ads just aren't working.
GM doesn't spend a lot of money on Facebook, but this is a big blow. Facebook's massive valuation is based on expectations of a glorious future as the pre-eminent platform for display advertising online.
The car firm is not Facebook's only critic. Nate Elliott, Forrester analyst, recently wrote in a blog post: "One global consumer goods company told us recently that Facebook was getting worse, rather than better, at helping marketers succeed."
He said the firm was great at innovating for its users but added: "Facebook just doesn't pay nearly as much attention to marketing as it does to user experience. (Not surprising, given its founder's famous loathing for advertisers.)"
Research released this week by WordStream, a search engine software and marketing firm, concluded that Google is doing a better job than Facebook on display ads. It found the average click-through rate (CTR) of an ad on the Google Display Network is 0.4% – almost 10 times as high as the typical Facebook ad.
The price ain't right
At $100bn Facebook has a price to earnings (p/e) ratio of about 100. Don't nod off – p/e ratios are a rough measure of how fast a company is expected to grow. GM has a p/e of 6.6, which means it's a slow grower. Google has a p/e of 19 these days but had also had a p/e in the 100s when it did its IPO.
But Google was growing far faster than Facebook back then. Google doubled its growth in the year after its IPO. In its most recent quarter Facebook's growth had reached 44% and had actually slowed from the previous quarter. In part that was because Facebook's advertising business is seasonal, and the previous quarter included the run-up to Christmas.
Let's say Facebook starts growing faster this year, say 40-60% growth for the year. That's impressive stuff for any normal company. But Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, calculates that even with a p/e of 65, Facebook's shares are worth about $24-$25 a piece. Facebook increased its price range for the IPO this week to $34 to $38 a share.
Facebook had revenue of $3.6bn last year, which is impressive. But Hamadeh calculates the company needs to take a quarter of the online ads in the entire world to justify its present price.
Mobile dilemma
Facebook mentions the word "mobile" 123 times in its prospectus. The company had 845m monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 31, 2011. Some 425m were mobile users. And they don't make Facebook any money.
"We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven," Facebook said in its prospectus. If Facebook was "unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users," the company's revenue growth could be harmed.
Analysts have speculated that mobile is one reason that Zuckerberg was so keen to spend $1bn buying the mobile photo-sharing app Instagram. Not that it makes any money on mobile either.
Life moves quickly online. Facebook is a product of the laptop/PC age. It's not yet proven it can make it in the mobile era.
Management
Mark Zuckerberg got where he is today by doing exactly what he wanted. When Facebook goes public he will still be its biggest shareholder and will have voting control over 55.8% of the company's shares.
Zuckerberg clearly believes life will continue as normal after the IPO. As Facebook states in the prospectus the firm "prioritizes our user engagement over short-term financial results, and we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability."
That's fine when you are a private company but as other tech stars including the Google boys and Amazon have found, Wall Street investors soon tire of wunderkinds who don't deliver quarter after quarter after quarter. Zuckerberg was going to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq, the stock exchange that will soon be home to Facebook. Now he's decided to celebrate in Silicon Valley. It's clear where his loyalties lie. Betting on Facebook means betting that Zuckerberg has a second act in which he can learn to value his new investors as highly as he values Facebook.
Slides from a presentation by Jason Grigsby about smart TV. The key problem with Smart TV right now: you can't know whether or what you're supplying content to.
In June 2009, Microsoft issued security update MS09-027, which fixed a remote code execution vulnerability in the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Despite the availability of the bulletin (and the passage of time), not every machine is up to date yet - which is how nearly three years later, malware has emerged that exploits the issue on machines running Office on Mac OS X. Fortunately, our data indicates that this malware is not widespread, but during our investigation we found a few interesting facts we'd like to share with you.
In a conference call, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of the Activision Publishing division, made a surprisingly direct statement on the success of Skylanders, the new toy/video game hybrid for consoles and iOS devices. With 30m toys sold and $100m in revenue across toys and games in the quarter, said Hirshberg, Skylanders made more money than the entire business of Rovio's Angry Birds franchise. Rovio announced today that Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 1 billion times, across both free and paid versions.
Skylanders is huge with kids with games consoles, who swap accomplishments in school playgrounds. They haven't gone away just because games consoles have arrived.
Faster downloading speeds have helped make Google's YouTube video-viewing more popular. Young urban Africans organise YouTube parties. The company is also trying to help African governments digitise information and make it freely available to their citizens. Many rulings in the higher courts of Ghana, for instance, are going online.
Yet critics complain that Google is buying up enormous amounts of virgin digital land in Africa at virtually no cost. Within a couple of decades, without the regulatory oversight of the African Union or African governments, they say, Africa's internet life will be almost entirely in hock to the Google giant. Even the company's decision to go slow on seeking profits from Africa by offering cheap deals has been attacked by African would-be rivals, which say that such tactics are only extending Google's unfair advantage.
Today, we're happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we'll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook's 500+ million mobile users.
This means we're no longer accepting new signups. If you're an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.
Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we've written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.
Chomp, chomp, chomp. Not buying the company, just acquiring the team.
You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today" as Forbes's Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.
Completely agree - the Forbes article is ridiculous linkbait nonsense. Read Dustin Curtis's piece instead: it's well-argued and rational.
Bach left Microsoft abruptly in 2010. Here he looks back at what Microsoft got right (and wrong) in the launch of the original Xbox and the Zune. As you may know, one of them went better than the other.
Francesco Caio, a former chief executive of Cable & Wireless and one of the architects of the government's existing broadband strategy, will be here on Wednesday 16 May between 11.45am and 12.45pm (BST) to take part in a live Q&A. Post your questions now
Francesco Caio, a former chief executive of Cable & Wireless, shied away from recommending the break up of BT Group when he was advising the government three years ago, but now believes this may be one way to ensure Britain gets the broadband network it needs.
Caio says the only truly future proof network is a point-to-point fibre infrastructure, with fibre-optic cables running not just to a street cabinet, but from each home all the way to the telephone or internet exchange.
He says the ultimate goal of any national broadband strategy must be the permanent search for infinite bandwidth between any two points in the country, with upload speeds as fast as download speeds.
"This is not just for the fun of having videos on demand or Skype," he said.
"Bandwidth drives transaction costs down opening the field to smaller companies and individuals. This is not a technological gizmo. This is using technology for social inclusion. The destination is fibre everywhere."
The copper telephone networks Europe relies on today were built by governments. Caio, who now heads the Italian aerospace group Avio, told a House of Lords inquiry into broadband recently that no single shareholder owned company is capable of undertaking alone the massive infrastructure project of replacing every copper wire with fibre.
He recommends hiving off BT's network into a separate company in which all the major broadband resellers – including Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and BT itself – could take a stake.
This company, which could also be listed on the stock exchange, would be promised a monopoly in the areas where Virgin Media, the only other UK company to have built its own broadband network, did not wish to operate. In exchange, its prices would be regulated.
Do you think the £29bn required to build an all fibre network would be a colossal waste of money? Can copper meet our needs for many years to come? Are there ways of encouraging BT to build more fibre without breaking the company up?
Post your questions in advance, or come and join the debate between 11.45am and 12.45pm (BST) on Wednesday 16 May.
Lengthy writeup of where Nokia is at the moment. We would humbly submit that if you've read our interview with Marko Ahtisaari, and other Nokia coverage, you know most of this already. But read it and see what else you get.
[Kaspersky CTO Nikolay] Grebennikov originally stated that Apple had invited Kaspersky Lab to work with the company on improving its security, but has since issued a clarification. The company has now said that its analysis of OS X was "conducted independently" but that "Apple is open to collaborating with [Kaspersky] regarding new OS X vulnerabilities."
In Computing's original interview, Grebennikov was specifically asked three times if Apple had requested Kaspersky Lab's assistance.
That hissing noise? The deflating sound from all the sites which had written "OMG APPLE GOES TO KASPERSKY FOR VIRUS HELP" stories. Not that Apple isn't facing a problem. But it's not going to Kaspersky for the solution.
This is great. Knock yourselves out arguing over the interpretation of the pie chart, the mysterious absence of other devices (Wii, PS3?), the non-inclusion of "PC" devices... there's enough here for days of argument. (It also shows how misleading the phrase "more than" can be.)
So here I am at Dell's huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the - by Dell chosen - moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. "The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy" he says. "What are you actually doing here?" he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.
This may be more complex than it looks. One commenter says that Mads Christensen, the compere, is a Danish comedian, and that his talk was actually ironic and in effect a reproach to the plethora of guys in the room. Others say that Christensen isn't - that he's just a jerk. Can anyone elucidate? (Dell later apologised, but even there commenters are saying it's overblown and he was being ironic.)
The new Google-commissioned paper, written by well-known UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, argues that such regulations would be preempted by the First Amendment. Google's search engine, they write, "uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries."
The authors argue that this selection process is no different, constitutionally speaking, from a newspaper editor selecting wire stories to run, a guidebook deciding which attractions to feature, or a parade organizer choosing which floats to include. The courts have ruled that all of these editorial processes are fully protected by the First Amendment.
True, but misses the point. The FTC's beef is with Google cross-promoting products such as its Google shopping comparison, or maps, or video, in its search results. When Google doesn't have a competitor in a space, the other product appears highly in search results. As soon as Google has a product, the rival vanishes from useful search results. Using the monopoly (search) to demote others in a space is, arguably, abuse of monopoly power. Microsoft's promotion in the 1990s of Internet Explorer on Windows used its engineers' judgements about what material users would find useful in browsing the web, but that didn't stop it being an abuse of monopoly. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)
When playing with the assumptions, it becomes clear that the model is most sensitive to the revenue per device and total devices in use. The profitability is entirely dependent on those figures as variable costs are a percent of sales and fixed costs are limited by talent constraints.
For example, if revenues per device drop to $4.50/yr then the operating margin drops to 38%.
Now we can calculate some of the more interesting figures. For example: o Android OEMs receive $0.76 on average per device per year o Android Operators receive $1.07 on average per device per year (including Play) o Android Developers, as a group, receive $1.94 per device per year (including Play and AdMob) o Google receives a contribution of $2.75 per device per year from Android
Again, these figures are very sensitive to the revenue per device (currently assumed to be $6.50).
Dediu points out in an earlier post that it's strange how, given the unexpected (even by Google) number of Android devices in use, that the benefit hasn't shown up clearly in Google's revenues and profits. Is the company just hiding how good a business Android is, or is it not that good compared to desktop search?
Harry McCracken digs into some of the (in some cases literally) fabulous stories emanating from Digitimes. How much should you believe it? You probably already know the answer, but it's worth seeing how it fares when he goes through a sample of 25 stories from the past two years.
US data only, presented as a heatmap, showing the most (and least) common days for a birthday. There's a strange gap in the data for July 4 and 5 which one has to assume is something to do with national holidays, since a similar one is found around Christmas. (Here's the original data.)
On Friday afternoon by local time, Judge William Alsup, the federal judge presiding over the Oracle v. Google lawsuit in the Northern District of California, entered a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) overruling the jury (as well as Google's opposition to an Oracle motion for JMOL) with respect to eight decompiled Java files.
Müller had originally said - in January 2011, 15 months ago - that 6 of those files were copied from Java into Android, and hence must be infringing. Turns out he was right (at least if you think the judge is right. And the judge is, well, a judge.)
So Oracle has now filed a motion asking for a postponement of phase three of the trial, the damages phase. It would like a new jury, too. It wants to wait to calculate damages until after the judge decides whether APIs are copyrightable, so it can add the 37 API files into the mix for damages, if they are. Maybe then it would have a prayer of getting some money.
In short, Oracle woke up and realized it's in a pickle of its own making. It was too clever by half, and now reality has struck. It clearly is worried that if they go to the damages phase now, it will gain a big fat zero in damages. It should have thought of that before it asked for infringer's profits, but there you are.
The problem with Groklaw's analyses is that it imputes motives that just don't exist, and acts as though Google's lawyers are geniuses, and Oracle's are idiots. Given that Oracle's lead attorney is David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1998, you'd think its writers would be more conflicted. Apparently not.
Richard [Gringras, head of news at Google] doesn't believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers' all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn't make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!'s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.
Paywalls are not a panacea. Richard's not against experimentation with paywall models. The New York Times was smart, he says, in designing its paywall with many levers to adjust revenue vs. traffic flow. It's not there yet, but they can experiment and find what works. He appreciates those who are looking at paywalls in a more nuanced way. Some publishers say, "They bought it before, they'll buy it again," or "We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news." But consumers never did pay the true costs.
Gringras essentially goes around giving much the same talk. This doesn't make it wrong.
Dell has announced a six-month, open source pilot program aimed at creating an ultrabook suited specifically for web and mobile developers. The Macbook Air and other OSX based machines have become the development environment of choice for a lot of web and mobile developers recently most likely due to software such as iLife, iMovie and other design tools.
Sure, what developers really want is to be able to organise their photos and cut little films. Dell's efforts here are praiseworthy, but iLife and iMovie really aren't the reason why the Macbook Air has succeeded with developers. Try: lightness and SSD.
Greg Sterling, making a lot of sense about why Apple's maps product on iOS is so much worse than Google's on Android, despite having the same back-end supplier:
Here's a bit of conspiracy theory: What if Apple wanted to replace Google Maps from a very early point and the company was biding its time until it could acquire and build the core assets and expertise to do so? Maybe that early point was when former CEO Steve Jobs' attitude toward Google changed, when he began to feel that Android was "a stolen product"?
To continue with my conjecture, maybe Apple thought it would be harder to wean iPhone users off a stronger Google-powered mapping product than the comparatively weak one that exists today. I know this seems very contrary to Apple's culture and corporate ethos. Yet replacing a weaker product with a stronger one is a lot easier than taking away a strong product from users who've come to depend on it.
Also, Google could then offer its own Google Maps app. Win-win.
Between May 8 and 9, 2012, the Websense® ThreatSeeker® Network detected that the Amnesty International United Kingdom website was compromised. The website was apparently injected with malicious code for these 2 days. During that time, website users risked having sensitive data stolen and perhaps infecting other users in their network. However, the website owners rectified this issue after we advised them about the injection. In early 2009, we discovered this same site was compromised, and in 2010, we reported another injection of an Amnesty International website, this time the Hong Kong site.
Entertaining, though not as bad as in the past. One point that always resonates:
One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a length installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then -- and only then -- go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.
The chair of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations, Professor S. Barry Cooper of Leeds University, continues his guest blog for the Guardian Northerner with a look at a legendary chess match
Back in 1944, at secret MI6 establishment Hanslope Park near Bletchley Park, Turing (the world's first computer scientist) talked of "building a brain". This was four years before the first 'stored program' computer, the 'Manchester Baby', was born. The first computing revolution had hardly begun.
Scroll forward 50 years - after 22-year old Kasparov had already become the youngest chess world champion ever - and we see IBM chess playing computer Deep Blue beat the best human player in the world. On the 15th anniversary of this victory in May 1997, here we are celebrating 100 years since Turing was born, with Kasparov himself (usual speaking fee $60,000) addressing the Turing Centenary Conference at Manchester Town Hall (June 22 to 26) and the Olympic flame passing by outside on Turing's actual birthday. It is a Turing-Kasparov link formed of computers, artificial intelligence, and Manchester.
We are of course a long way from building that brain that Turing dreamt of, and Kasparov talks interestingly about the difference between human and machine thinking. One of Turing's first discoveries when he was just 23 was that computers can't do everything. It was a short step from his 1936 dream of a computing future to a mathematical proof that most problems cannot be solved by any computer! And computers certainly have a hard time predicting all sorts of worldly events, from earthquakes, to weather, to economic crises.
Is there anything we can do that a computer can't? Could a computer write like Shakespeare - "to compute or not to compute, that is the Halting Problem"? Can we build an intelligent machine - and when?
Alan Turing is often dubbed 'the Father of Computer Science'. In 1950 he certainly took a paternalistic view of his 'late developer' computers. Not only did he considerthe measure of intelligence to be doing as well as a human: he only allowed humans to judge the competition. This is how he described his famous Test:
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
And the Turing Test is still with us, and is the basis for the famous Loebner Prize, with a reward of $100,000 for:
the first computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human's.
This year, the Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition is on May 15 at Turing's wartime haunt of Bletchley Park. Watch for news of the winning machine. But it's a safe bet Hugh Loebner's $100,000 is safe.
Underlying these 'X Factor for computers' competitions is a serious controversy. On one side we have Marvin Minsky, grand theorist of Artificial Intelligence, claiming:
AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s.
On the other, Rodney Brooks with his more experimental robot-centered approach admits:
Marvin may have been leveling his criticism at me.
Many computer scientists think that what the brain does does not depend on the stuff it's made of. People like Brooks belioeve that 'embodiment' is important. And he is a big fan of Turing, saying in my forthcoming book Alan Turing - His Work and Impact (due from Elsevier in July):
It is humbling to read Alan Turing's papers. He thought of it all. First.
Brooks is another of the giants of computer science converging on Manchester for the Turing Centenary Conference, speaking just after Kasparov on June 25.
So how close are we to making a brain? It depends who you ask. Computers certainly do wonderful things nowadays. A nice Turing quote, seen on T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs these days, is this:
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
It featured in Google chair Eric Schmidt's address to the huge Turing Celebration at Princeton University on 10 May. However, today's consensus is that the brain is just that bit more surprising than any of today's computers.
But do we really want machines to think like humans? Turing thought that making mistakes was necessary for intelligent thought. What makes human intelligence work with all its fallibility is its interaction with others and with the wider world.
We rely on the fact that human brains are not manufactured on a production line, but evolve to represent a huge variety of very individual ways of 'computing', creatively yet fallibly. Can we learn to be as clever in building thinking machines as is the complex and beautiful world around us? And how will we deal with criminal computers? Future computer surprises can bring risks.
Here's a YouTube clip about the mighty match between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Follow the Alan Turing Year on Twitter at: @AlanTuringYear and for all the events happening in 2012, check out the Alan Turing Year website here.
Professor S. Barry Cooper is a mathematician at the University of Leeds. He is Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), which is co-ordinating the Alan Turing Year, and President of the association Computability in Europe.
You have to delve quite a long way into the simple answer that Siri gives to get to explain why it says Nokia's new Lumia 900 is the best phone. The reasons are illuminating, though
Why is it that when you ask Siri "what's the best cellphone ever?" (or "best mobile phone ever" or "best smartphone ever") that it responds with "the Nokia Lumia 900"?
Quite simple: because Siri hands the query (being non-weather-related) off to the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which pulls its data in from Best Buy, where the Nokia Lumia 900 had a total of five - count them - favourable reviews.
In each there's a link: "user rating: 5 out of 5 (based on 4 reviews)".
Unfortunately even that isn't accurate. If you look at the page that that links to, it says that it has a rating of 4.4 out of 5, from 11 reviews. So Wolfram Alpha isn't quite keeping a live feed on this.
But… if you look at it, the latest reviews date from 11 April - which is when this all blew up. Be suspicious of those reviews. The earliest ones are more trustworthy, but even those might not be as believable as you might want.
The next up? The LG Tracfone - a $19.99 phone (this comes up whether you ask for a "smartphone", "mobile phone" or "cellphone". WolframAlpha says it's 5/5 - based on 1 review.
But no, even that isn't right. There are two reviews, of which one is a 5-star (yay!) posted on 16 March and the other is a 1-star posted on… 11 May. Ah, the same day that this Siri thing came up. So that's probably not a "real" review.
Whatever - it's a nice meme, but it doesn't bear fact-checking.
After a series of never-ending clicks, I believe I was able to trace this "story" back to its roots. Dalrymple linked to AppleInsider, which links to TheNextWeb (hi Robin!), which links to ZUnited, which links to WMPoweruser.
So - a fun story, not entirely supported by the facts.
(Revel in it anyway. Here's the photo, in small form, from WMPoweruser.)
But it does tell us a couple of things.
First: some people get very worked up about what smartphone they're using. (See how people are trying to game the reviews more recently to push the rankings down.)
Second: expect to see more of this kind of thing as people probe WolframAlpha to see what answer gives for "best X ever" that doesn't offer an Apple product ("best MP3 player ever" isn't going to fit the bill, but "best computer ever" will!)
Third: savvy marketing people are going to start gaming reviews like this to push their phones up rankings. Actually, you'd expect this is happening already, wouldn't you?
Fourth: hope that WolframAlpha to have a rethink about whether trying to answer "best X ever" is much use. Or whether BestBuy's customer reviews section is actually the place to ask.
Update: in the comments, @MarcoPoloMint puts the problem that this illustrates beautifully:
What there is... is a rather worrying tendency for 'intelligent search' to default to rather silly, subjective and easily manipulable review sites (Best Buy? The US equivalent of Dixons). It shows the weakness in the chain. It's worrying because voice input + intelligent search is increasingly going to be the future of human computer interaction (smartphones, now Kinect with Internet Explorer, maybe the new Apple iTV...). So these kinks and weaknesses should be sorted out now.
That's it exactly. When you search for "best" anything - on sites such as Amazon, Yelp, Google, anywhere that offers a rating - you have to be aware of whether the results come from (a) a representative sample (how many Lumia reviews do you need for it to be robust? How many for a restaurant review?) (b) actual buyers (or is it marketing people stuffing the reviews?). Boiling questions down to one-line answers carries risks that are far more subtle than whether we get a laugh from Siri's responses. The question is whether we're aware of them.
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