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In our first article dedicated to Facebook, Mashable reports on a recent server-upgrade that cost them US$100 Million without spending anything:
According to Business Week, the social network has closed a deal to take a $100 million loan (“venture lending”), all of which will be spent on new servers. Facebook gives up no equity as part of the deal. Essentially, it’s a really, really huge credit card, with very favorable terms. In all, Facebook has now raised in excess of $300 million, including $240 million from Microsoft, $100 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, and an undisclosed amount from the Samwer brothers.
Inquisitr (the new blog from TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley) reports on a rumor that co-founder and CTO of Facebook, Adam D’Angelo is leaving…
The reasons behind D’Angelo’s departure have so far not been disclosed, but it’s a strange move given D’Angelo’s supposed close relationship with Mark Zuckerberg; D’Angelo has been often cited as Zuckerberg’s best friend. It’s also a rare employee move away from Facebook at a time the social networking giant is attracting the cream of Valley talent.
As CTO at Facebook, D’Angelo oversaw the Platform Development team, the Data team and new product design and architecture. As well as holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Caltech, D’Angelo was named one of the top 24 finalists in the international Topcoder Collegiate Challenge in 2005, which competition which tests the ability to design and implement complex algorithms in a timed environment.
Duncan also reported on another potential rumour that Microsoft may be looking to buy Facebook and save face over the Yahoo deal:
A report just released by the Wall Street Journal claims the company’s bankers have been in touch with the social networking site to “gauge [its] willingness to sell.” The Journal cites the also Dow Jones-owned All Things Digital blog for first breaking the news early this morning. It does note, however, that there are no “active discussions” going on as of yet.
Microsoft already has hundreds of millions invested in Facebook. It bought a 1.6 percent stake in the company last fall. But how serious the idea of an actual acquisition could be is yet to be seen. Just today in Tokyo, Bill Gates said his company won’t go after any other takeovers following its failed talks with Yahoo. Microsoft dropped its discussions to buy the search engine over the weekend after failing to agree on a price.
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Earlier this year, Domain Tools offered an interesting article concerning the marriage of domain names and the multi-million dollar market-place for premium domain names:
Imagine if when people purchased houses they were not allowed to have mortgages. Sit back and just ponder that for a minute before reading the rest of the article…. When people can purchase $10M dollar domains for $500K down with a 5 percent interest rate that is when we will see the most valuable of domain names start trading hands with the smaller investors. Travel.com is easily worth $50 Million. However not one domain investor has a wallet big enough to afford swallowing it in one bite. No one buys assets that big with all cash. Domains like these will never trade hands until institutional money starts backing our industry.
If you can afford a domain like Travel.com for $10M right now, you will be laughing all the way to the bank in a few years when financing catches up with our industry. $10 Million would be a steal for anyone that purchased Travel.com at this price. Not many people can purchase with all cash right now, but those that do get a good discount because there is a small supply of super rich guys with all cash offers. It all comes back to supply and demand. How many people purchase a house with all cash? If I was the owner of Travel.com I would never sell for $10 Million right now. I would hold out until the institutional money shows up and allows purchase prices to climb into the 10 digit range. Hotels.com was purchased for a song a few years ago, the new owners of this property now know the true power of generic signature domains.
Later in March of 2008, they reported again on the sale of Fund.com for US$ 10 Million:
Well, technically it sold for $9,999,950 in an all-cash transaction, though I am not sure why $50 was withheld from making it an even $10M. Even in this slow market we are seeing record-setting sales figures. A publicly-reported transaction of this size is rare, I know of a few domains well above $10M, such as Poker.com and Sex.com, that never officially disclosed their prices. The few runners-up so far have been Business.com and Porn.com which both didn’t quite make it to the $10 Million dollar range but were very close.
It takes a lot of work to broker a domain at this price, what could have been registered for nothing 20 years ago is now worth more money then one man could spend. The generic domains that command power are these category domains.
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Second Life users need to be cautious with Quicktime embedded videos in the game as it may be used to pick your pocket of Linden Dollars. Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, of Independent Security Evaluators, have found that by using a flaw in Quicktime, they can not only pick the pocket of any user within 100 virtual feet of the player, they can take complete control of the avatar. Once the account has been taken over, the hackers can then use that avatar to go to other lands, embed their virus loaded video, and it will continue to spread from land to land.
Since Linden Dollars can be converted to real money (L$250 = $1 USD approximately), someone using this hack could turn this in to quite the money making venture.
With more and more real life commerce happening inside of Second Life, and some people making their livings via the game, people need to be as careful as possible.
Second Life is prohibiting the offering of interest or any direct return on an investment, whether in any currency, from an object such as an ATM within Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.
That’s a mouthful, but it boils down to heavier regulation of money that can be made in Second Life–more importantly, how that money is made. It sounds an awful lot like a governmental role, but it’s an important step for the virtual world, especially if it would like to avoid actual regulations from the real government. Second Life has in fact been receiving complaints from residents regarding banking activity, and in order for Second Life to remain the entity that it is, it has to self-regulate to a larger and larger extent. Part of what made Second Life an almost-household name was the bickering about virtual property that eventually led to a real lawsuit (in real life).
The Electric Sheep Company is best known recently for its work in creating the CSI:NY build in Second Life. The company offers its own Second Life browser “OnRez”, and provides services to companies looking to establish a presence in Second Life.
It would be easy to suggest that Electric Sheep Company’s failure here may be indicative of a broader downturn in Second Life; however, the more likely scenario is simply that this is a company that added too many staff in the expectation of ongoing and future work that didn’t happen, and they would be far from the first startup to be caught in this situation.
Compound this with a highly competitive market and unfortunately for 22 people at the Electric Sheep Company, Christmas this year wont involve dreams of electric sheep.
Although some would say that this smells like the end of virtual worlds, Read / Write Web reports that Forrester has released a new report regarding the use of virtual worlds within the workplace:
The report makes the big claim that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”. But before we get too carried away, the report also notes that right now virtual worlds are not user friendly to the enterprise crowd - “you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools”.
Forrester cites investments in this area by big organizations like BP, IBM, Intel, and the US Army. The use cases include:
“Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Use them to try to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others; allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects; and make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating nonverbal communication into same-time and place interactions.”
Habbo, a virtual world for teens, signed a deal with the William Morris Agency, one of Hollywood’s oldest and largest talent agencies. As part of the deal, WMA will promote its celebrity sports and entertainment clients within the digital world and help Habbo forge new promotional partnerships in Hollywood.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the two companies will likely seek shared revenue by selling virtual goods to teens. Habbo, which is run by Finland-based Sulake Corp., draws as many as 8 million teen visitors from around the world, with 1.3 million coming from the United States, according to the company.
An interesting article from Mashable reports on RIP Lounge, a new virtual world developed by an advertising network:
Stable Media, LLC has teamed up with Wyndstorm to create the upcoming virtual world for social networking, called riplounge.
The beta version launches today. Now, we’ve seen a great deal of virtual worlds that have launched in the past couple of years, some of the more recent have had the blatant approach to self-promotion.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I’d rather have an ad-supported virtual world, with digital banners and commercial-ridden video clips than a downloadable tool that requires my credit-card number. From there.com to Wells Fargo, virtual worlds are finding themselves as good use towards niche communities, with a variety of interactive options presented to the end user.
The various virtual locations will be used as multimedia channels for content distribution and advertising purposes. For instance, the night club could have a virtual DJ release a new song. It’s the interactive and custom options that spin off from such promotions that will provide value to the users on the other end of riplounge, however, so it will be rather interesting to see what Sable Media plans to do towards this end.
For an extremely inspiring look into the future of virtual user interaction, you simply must check-out this update from Smashing Magazine, which discusses and demos some of the following products:
Reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface.
Multi-Touch Technology
Multi-Touch-based devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations.
The full article has many more technologies and examples to see…
To conclude, we have chosen an article from our recently launched advertising and marketing blog (AD8) that covers Elle MachPherson’s new interactive store fronts:
We discovered this on Geek Sugar, where during New York Fashion Week, Elle MacPherson Intimates launched a new high tech interactive storefront that allows passersby to revel in the video footage of models through the window with their movements.
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Getting straight into our most recent Microsoft Update by updating you on their bid to acquire Yahoo, we decided to clock-quote Inside Microsoft:
Microsoft announced tonight it will not be going forward with its plan to buy Yahoo, after it was clear the two sides could not agree on a price, and Steve Ballmer elected not to risk his entire career on the deal. Here’s Microsoft’s press release announcing the decision. It’s clear that Microsoft raised its offer to $33 (effectively adding $4 to the deal, based on stock value, or $5 billion, and Yahoo wanted another $4, a total of $10 billion over the original offer, which Microsoft believed was unworkable.
Additionally, TechCrunch reports that Xobni also turned them down:
After negotiating over the past few weeks with Microsoft and signing a letter of intent to be acquired, e-mail startup Xobni has walked from the deal, according to a source close to the negotiations. The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range. (The company has raised less than $5 million so far in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, First Round Capital, Ron Conway, and Y Combinator).
But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there.
However, Microsoft do score a victory with the purchase of Farecast for US$ 115 Million (as reported by TechCrunch):
Rumors about the acquisition of Farecast are accurate - in a very brief blog post CEO Hugh Crean says they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. SeattlePI, which first broke the rumor last week, says the price tag was $115 million. While the two companies are an understandable fit given their proximity and partnership over MSN Travel, SeattlePI reports that Farecast entertained multiple offers before accepting Microsoft’s.\
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