Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Review - TechShout

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Review - TechShout

Facebook IPO seeks to raise $13.6B, valuation up to $88B

Facebook has set pricing details for its IPO, paving the way for a mid-May offering. Expect the road show to begin on Monday.

Facebook is now seeking to raise as much as $13.6 billion in its IPO, according to an SEC filing today, which would value the company at roughly $88 billion. The company is aiming to price its shares between $28 and $35.

This paves for the way for Facebook and its bankers to begin the road show on Monday, with shares to start trading on May 17 or 18. While this valuation is lower than the $100 billion that has often been cited, the price will likely change depending on the success of the road show.

The valuation cited above is based on data from PrivCo, a firm that digs into private company data. CEO Sam Hamadeh calculated the value using 2.513 billion fully diluted shares outstanding, including options and vested stock grants.

Today's SEC filing follows weeks of speculation that the IPO might be pushed back to June -- oreven later -- because CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been spending a ton of money buying Instagram and a trove of patents from Microsoft. All of which gave the SEC examiners more work to do before signing off on the IPO.

While Facebook's bankers have already been unofficially feeling out demand for the IPO among big money managers, this was just part of the pre-road show dance. Now comes the real thing, where the Wall Street gang travels around with key executives to fill the so-called order book.

The road show, too, has led to much speculation over whether Zuckerberg himself would even participate. Although the road show will lean heavily on the participation of COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman, Zuckerberg will also play a role.

Zuckerberg will presumably shed his hoodie for a coat and tie and play along in the interest of drumming up demand for what should be the biggest Internet IPO in history. As well he should, considering he owns about 28 percent of the stock and 57 percent of its class B shares, giving him outsized voting power. The New York Times reports that Facebook executives will meet in New York tomorrow with the sales forces of the company's underwriters to talk through the presentation. They'll then shop the prospectus to prospective investors. The stock will trade under the ticker symbol FB.Zuckerberg takes part in a video pitch for investors, which you can see on Facebook's site here.

Even though Facebook's growth slowed in the last quarter, demand for the IPO is still likely to be off-the-charts. The bet is that Zuck and team will figure out a way to turn Facebook's unprecedented user base -- now more than 900 million strong -- into a cash machine. And with so much hype around the IPO, money mangers will likely fear missing out.

No one will be surprised if the bankers and Facebook adjust the price higher in the coming weeks. Then, if all goes as planned, Zuckerberg will ring the bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite at Times Square, just days after he celebrates his 28th birthday.

It'll be a memorable birthday.

iPhone 5 launching with 4-inch screen, new Dock connector?

That's the latest rumor from iLounge, which claims to have a source with knowledge of Apple's smartphone plans.

The iPhone 5 rumors keep coming.

Apple's upcoming smartphone will come with a 4-inch screen, due mainly to a thinner, taller body, according to Apple-focused site iLounge, citing an unnamed source. The site's source claims Apple's new iPhone will be 10mm taller than the iPhone 4S, and about 2mm thinner. By keeping the same width and tossing in the display to fit the new form factor, Apple is able to deliver more screen space than what's available on 3.5-inch-equipped iPhones, according to the source.

Although the front of the iPhone 5 will look about the same, the back will feature a flat, metal panel stretching from beneath the camera to nearly the bottom. iLounge's sources did not say why the device might come with that additional element. Aside from the metal panel, the device will boast Gorilla Glass 2 technology, according to the site's source.

Rumors have been surrounding the iPhone 5 for months now. Much of what iLounge claims will be coming to the device has already been cited in previous rumors. And in each case, Apple has stayed tight-lipped, allowing the rumor mill to heat up and speculation to run rampant. So, be sure to take all of this with a healthy heaping of salt until the final product is officially announced.One of the more surprising moves, though, might be iLounge's contention that Apple will launch the iPhone 5 with a new Dock connector featuring fewer pins than the 30-pin option found across its mobile devices today. The new connector is "closer to a pill shape" and will find its way to all future mobile devices the company launches, according to iLounge.

And when might that final product be announced? iLounge says the iPhone 5 is slated for a fall release.

10 Reasons Why Facebook Bought Instagram

When The Social Network 2 is written, I hope the screenwriter won’t pass up the chance to have Mark Zuckerberg explain toSean Parker that “a billion dollars isn’t cool.Spending a billion dollars is.”

Facebook’s announcement Monday that it is acquiring Instagram, a precious mobile app for sharing retro-ized photos has everyone asking, ‘Why would Facebook pay $1 billion for a company with no revenue?”

2. Because it didn’t want a competitor to snap it up first. “It appears that Facebook really wanted to purchase Instagram before another bidder (maybeGoogle) made the deal,” says Loughran.1. Because it could. It’s fairly unusual for a company to drop a cool billion heading into its IPO, but Facebook already has a ton of cash on hand (just under $4 billion according to its S-1 filing) thanks to private share sales to Goldman Sachs, says University of Notre Dame biz prof Tim Loughran. “Facebook, with huge cash on hand, is already acting like a big, publicly-traded tech company,” says Loughran. “Facebook didn’t need to go public first to get the cash to make the major acquisition.”

3. Because Facebook’s mobile app sucks. Instagram’s doesn’t. “Will this deal look cheap in two years?” asks Victoria Barrett. “Probably, if Facebook works on your phone.”

4. Because Facebook is having a midlife crisis, and the acquisition of the beloved, hip photo-sharing app is its equivalent of buying a sportscar. The universal consensus is that Facebook isn’t cool anymore. It’s got wrinkles, or at least many more users with wrinkles. By buying Instagram, Facebook bought itself 30 million hipsters, and all of their wonderful hipster cool.

5. Because most people are on Facebook to look at other people’s photos, and Facebook wants to keep it that way. Now you’ll be able to add all kinds of cool filters to your Facebook photos, a feature that attracted over 30 million people to Instagram. “Providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Om Malik at GigaOm translated that as: “Facebook was scared s**less and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects.”

6. More data. Which translates into better mobile ads. Techie Robert Scoble argues that Instagram has a better idea of what its users are doing and what they like doing. “If you are a skiier, you take pictures of snow and skiing. If you are a foodie you take pictures of food at high-end restaurants. If you are into quilting, a lot of your photos will be of that,” writes Scoble at Quora. “Facebook’s databases need this info to optimize the media it will bring to you. This data is WORTH S***LOADS! Imagine you’re a ski resort and want to reach skiiers, Instagram will give them a new way to do that, all while being far more targeted than Facebook otherwise could be.”

7. Because it wanted to buy soul. Facebook has become a huge, money-making behemoth, which makes it very attractive to investors but makes it slightly harder to take Mark Zuckerberg seriously when he waxes poetic about the Hacker Way. The users of Instagram are still enamored of their little app, so much so that they feel outraged about it selling out.  “Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity,” says Paul Ford at NYMag.

8. Because it’s cheaper than inventing a time machine. “Before Instagram, if I wanted my pictures to look like they were taken in the ‘60s, I’d have to invent a time machine and travel back 50 years,” said one of the Daily Show’s “youth” correspondents.

9. Because it wanted an upscale version of Facebook to keep the digital upper class happy. Just as Williams Sonoma created West Elm for those who turned up their noses at Pottery Barn, Facebook needs a place where its users can hang out where they won’t run into the “technological laggards.” “Facebook is not the preferred destination or permanent mailing address of the digital upper class,” writes Carles at Grantland. “While Facebook became one of the most valuable sites on the Internet by allowing mass-market audiences to participate in ‘life’ as we now know it, it is still under the threat of becoming an impersonal experience without constant innovation that is aimed at making users feel like they are building something meaningful as they upload their ‘lives’ to the social network. Being on Facebook just doesn’t make you feel like a VIP.”

But being on Instagram does, in part because it has been the exclusive provenance of iPhone users for so long. When it finally released a version for the Droid, I snapped it up immediately.

10. Because it’s scared. “Young hot technology companies are nothing if not aware of their mortality,” write Nick Bilton and Somini Snegupta at the New York Times. “Because so many started out by wounding an older tech giant, they know they can be killed, or at least severely injured, by that which lurks in the rented office space of Silicon Valley — an even hotter, younger technology company.”

Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years

We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.  And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.

When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance.  One of the central tenents of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes.  What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.

As a graduate student, I didn’t have much time for this ecology line of thinking.  I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment.  We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though the sociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts of lottery winners.There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much.  This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s.  They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes.  They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate.  Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.

As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of technology and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.

More and more in tech, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.

Think of the differences between generations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently from Gen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials.  Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.

In the tech world, we’ve really had 3 generations:

• Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
• Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon(GRPN)),
• and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).

With each succeeding generation in tech, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings.  Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion.  Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it.  Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.

When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections.   MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially.  Facebook got college students.  LinkedIn got the white collar professionals.  Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.

Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users.  Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm.  Why has Amazon done so little in social?  And Google?  Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.

Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world.  These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application.  They don’t even think of launching via a web site.  They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.

We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm.  Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies.  It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization.  Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience.  It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year.  It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.

The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time.  This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.

Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete?  They’re still growing.  They still have enormous audiences.  They also have very talented managers.

But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline.  What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up.  Tim Cook had an interesting line about the velocity of change in his earnings call last week:

through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.

Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000 self.  There is increasing chatter (including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction, once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of its revenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically drop traditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobile world.  Is Amazon destined to decline?  There seem to be no signs of it today and people will still need to buy stuff in a mobile world, but the new mobile platform will certainly open the possibilities for new entrants that Amazon can’t even imagine today.

Facebook is also probably facing a tough road ahead as this shift to mobile happens.  As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try to address that issue [of the shift to mobile] by breaking up its various features into separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed, one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the core product, probably to its detriment.”

Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social.  Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Not really, in my view.  It shows they’re really fearful of being displaced by a mobile upstart.  However, why would bolting on a mobile app to a Web 2.0 platform (and a very good one at that) change any of the underlying dynamics we’re discussing here? I doubt it.

What about Apple?  Where does it fit in to this classification scheme?

Apple is really a hardware company, so it’s difficult to put it into a bucket related to web apps.  It certainly seemed very Web 1.0 with its Ping social application.  Yet it’s succeeded in mobile from making the best hardware and software ecosystem for apps to proliferate on.  In some ways, as long as it has a successful iOS platform, it doesn’t care which Web 1.0, 2.0 and mobile companies fail or succeed on top of it.  Maybe that’s why so many non-mobile companies seem to want to emulate Apple.  Google bought Motorola Mobility (MMI) to get into the hardware business.  Facebook and Baidu (BIDU) are rumored to be launching their own mobile OS.

The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic.  It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.

They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it.  I often hear Google bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesis that Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month for value-added services as proof of future profits.  Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies?  I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies.

It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands of enterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows.  Google’s 76% market share.  Facebook’s 900 million monthly users.  They just aren’t as sticky as they seem.

And does anyone think the pace of change is going to increase in the next 5 years versus the last?  That we’re going to see fewer innovations, fewer start-ups trying more stuff on cheaper and more powerful processing power?  In all likelihood, we could have an entirely new way of gathering information and interacting with ads in a new mobile world than what we’re currently used to today.

The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today.  And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.

Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.

Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it.  It’s all up for grabs.  Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.