May 16, 2012

Made me think: Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO - Via HBR

Some very good points below. I am rather optimistic on facebook's future - and an avid user- but won't buy their stock, at this time;). Not entirely sure why.

Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO - Maxwell Wessel - Harvard Business Review

"However, the advertising business is dependent on visits to Facebook’s website. As of yet, the company has not built out a compelling mobile advertising platform. And unfortunately for the Facebook investor, mobile internet is becoming increasingly important. Facebook even amended its S-1 to acknowledge the risks to its advertising business from increasing adoption of the mobile format.
While this is a surmountable problem, it puts the media company in a very different position than that of Google in 2004 — the company that Facebook is most often compared against. When Google IPO’d in 2004, the company’s advertising business had tailwinds; internet penetration was only at around 68% in the U.S. (let alone the rest of the world) and amount of use per user was also on the rise. Growth in revenues for Google was inevitable. Facebook’s ability to achieve enormous advertising growth, on the other hand, is far less certain.

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May 16, 2012 8:12:09 PM | Current Affairs, Facebook

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Words of Wisdom from the World E-Reading Congress 2012 (good review of my talk and preso) Roger Tagholm at Publishing Perspectives just published a nice review of the World eReading Congress in London, on Tuesday, where I had the pleasure of doing the opening keynote. The 6MB low-res PDF can be downloaded via this link: Download Ereading congress london gerd Leonhard (note: this is quick version, better resolution soon on Slideshare). Here are the best snippets from Roger's review (and the rest of it is a good overview, as well!) By Roger Tagholm "Access not ownership, relationships not transactions and concerns over who owns the channel to market – these were some of the themes of the second World E-Reading Congress which began in London on Monday. Once again, organizers Terrapin had assembled a powerful line-up of speakers who provided a one-stop take on what is happening in the digital space. From “haptic technology” (from the Greek Haptikos, “pertaining to the sense of touch”) to “lean back” readers, this was also the place to get a jargon update and phrase fix. The View from a Futurist Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard kicked things off. He believes the debate will soon be about access, not ownership and said that “for those over 30 it’s very hard to understand this switch. There will be some ownership, but it won’t grow. With music, iTunes sales are flat, but streaming is growing. It will happen with books. A Spotify for books will come. If a student wants 300 books, he’ll buy a three-year subscription”. Small examples of that already exist, but Leonhard means on a mass scale, such as that being contemplated in Brazil “where the government is looking to buy 100 million devices for students so they don’t have to buy the physical books”. He believes there is more to the future than walled gardens and that “humans need meaning,...

Gerd Leonhard

Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist

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