Month: May 2012

Facebook IPO Tanked

Yes, it did. The Facebook IPO valued the company at approximately $100 billion! Are they mad? What were they thinking? Easy to say that now but I think I have ranted at length to friends about insane valuations on Web 2.0 companies. These companies haven’t really proved that they can make all the much money off the many millions of users that they have. I for one can’t remember that last time that I clicked on a Facebook advert. I would like to say I never have but sometimes stray mouse clicks occur (I remember this causing accidental friend requests which is awkward and annoying). I can’t say I even notice them there much. I have definitely not bought any Facebook tokens/credits or whatever they call their attempt at a digital currency.

So what was the route of that crazy valuation? Web 2.0 companies burn cash at alarming rates. They have all that server hardware to keep running and must constantly innovate to remain relevant. Its likely that the venture capitalists behind building Facebook into what it is today wanted some of there money back. Not only that I assume that they too where taken in by that headline figure of 900million users or whatever it is. So based on promises of untold access to millions of people and pressure from venture capitalists the valuation had to be sky high. They didn’t have any other choice. Not to value highly would be to admit that the whole business plan wasn’t what they lead us all to believe. The problem is that it doesn’t matter how many users you have if all they do is turn cash into heat via looking at some pictures of their mates.

New use for post boxes…

I read on The Register that Spectrum Interactive are putting wifi hot spots into old phone boxes. Neat idea, not sure how useful it is unless you can sit somewhere nearby but it might work. However I had another idea. I’m currently sat in Starbucks where for the cost of a cup of coffee I am charging up my phone and laptop. So… why not public use power points in old phone boxes? You could sit squashed into a phone box doing some surfing while all the gadgets that you need to run your life get juiced up for another 8ish hours of 21st century life.

BT Infinity

I moved house to somewhere that has BT infinity. That sounds a bit like I didn’t it deliberately, I didn’t. Although, it was a contributing factor. It was finally installed today. Seems pretty good. I don’t know if its true that it it takes a week or so to ‘settle’ down to a stable speed but it does seem a little all over the place. First impressions are that the speed over the wireless network isn’t that impressive. I’m only getting around 10MB ish, up and down. Although the speed testing services didn’t seem to be very consistent. Plug the cable in and things get much quicker, to the point where it seems that the testing services can’t really keep up. I tried a more ‘real’ world test and got 3.5MB per second downloading Ubuntu from the mirrorservice.org.uk. So that suggests that my wireless devices can’t make a good enough connection to get the maximum speed.

Another real world test I tried was BBC iPlayer. In my old place this would constantly pause and need to rebuffer etc. Now I can click around in the play back position bar and the program starts straight away. This is the same regardless of whether I am using wireless or a cable. So where doesn’t that leave me. With a very good internet connections I guess. As long as it doesn’t ‘settle’ down to a speed that I could get without paying for Infinity its all good.