FaceBook IPO- Who hacked whom?

Some thoughts on the FB IPO-

1) Is Zuck reading emails on his honeymoon? Where is he?

2) In 3 days FB lost 34 billion USD in market valuation. Thats enough to buy AOL,Yahoo, LinkedIn and Twitter (combined)

3) People are now shorting FB based on 3-4 days of trading performance. Maybe they know more ARIMA !

4) Who made money on the over-pricing in terms on employees who sold on 1 st day, financial bankers who did the same?

5) Who lost money on the first three days due to Nasdaq’s problems?

6) What is the exact technical problem that Nasdaq had?

7) The much deplored FaceBook Price/Earnings ratio (99) is still comparable to AOL’s (85) and much less than LI (620!). see http://www.google.com/finance?cid=296878244325128

8) Maybe FB can stop copying Google’s ad model (which Google invented) and go back to the drawing table. Like a FB kind of Paypal

9) There are more experts on the blogosphere than experts in Wall Street.

10) No blogger is willing to admit that they erred in the optimism on the great white IPO hope.

I did. Mea culpa. I thought FB is a good stock. I would buy it still- but the rupee tanked by 10% since past 1 week against the dollar.

 

I am now waiting for Chinese social network market to open with IPO’s. Thats walled gardens within walled gardens of Jade and Bamboo.

Related- Art Work of Another 100 billion dollar company (2006)

Adding / to robots. text again

So I tried to move without a search engine , and only social sharing, but for a small blog like mine, that means almost 75% of traffic comes via search engines.
Maybe the ratio of traffic from search to social will change in the future,

I have now enough data to conclude search is the ONLY statistically significant driver of traffic ( for a small blog)
If you are a blogger you should definitely try and give the tools at Google Webmaster a go,

eg

 

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

URL Googlebot type Fetch Status Fetch date
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Denied by robots.txt 1/19/12 8:25 PM
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Success URL and linked pages submitted to index 12/27/11 9:55 PM

 

Also from Google Analytics, I see that denying search traffic doesnot increase direct/ referral traffic in any meaningful way.

So my hypothesis that some direct traffic was mis-counted as search traffic due to Chrome, toolbar search – well the hypothesis was wrong 🙂

Also Google seems to drop url quite quickly (within 18 hours) and I will test the rebound in SERPs in a few hours.  I was using meta tags, blocked using robots.txt, and removal via webmasters ( a combination of the three may have helped)

To my surprise search traffic declined to 5-10, but it did not become 0. I wonder why that happens (I even got a few Google queries per day) and I was blocking the “/” fron robots.txt.

 

Net Net- The numbers below show- as of now , in a non SOPA, non Social world, Search Engines remain the webmasters only true friend (till they come up with another panda or whatever update 😉 )

Revolution Webinar Series #Rstats

Revolution Analytics Webinar-

 

Featured Webinar
David Champagne REGISTER NOW
Presenter David Champagne
CTO, Revolution Analytics
Date Tuesday, December 20th
Time 11:00AM – 11:30AM Pacific 
Click here for the webinar time in your local time zone

Big Data Starts with R

Traditional IT infrastructure is simply unable to meet

the demands of the new “Big Data Analytics” landscape.   Many enterprises are turning to the “R” statistical programming language and Hadoop (both open source projects) as a potential solution. This webinar will introduce the statistical capabilities of R within the Hadoop ecosystem.  We’ll cover:

  • An introduction to new packages developed by Revolution Analytics to facilitate interaction with the data stores HDFS and HBase so that they can be leveraged from the R environment
  • An overview of how to write Map Reduce jobs in R using Hadoop
  • Special considerations that need to be made when working with R and Hadoop.

We’ll also provide additional resources that are available to people interested in integrating R and Hadoop.

 

Upcoming Webinars
Wed, Dec 14th
11:00AM – 11:30AM PT
Revolution R Enterprise – 100% R and MoreR users already know why the R language is the lingua franca of statisticians today: because it’s the most powerful statistical language in the world. Revolution Analytics builds on the power of open source R, and adds performance, productivity and integration features to create Revolution R Enterprise. In this webinar, author and blogger David Smith will introduce the additional capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise.
 Archived Webinars-
Revolution Webinar: New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (including RevoScaleR) to Support Scalable Data AnalysisRevolution R Enterprise 5.0 is Revolution Analytics’ scalable analytics platform.  At its core is Revolution Analytics’ enhanced Distribution of R, the world’s most widely-used project for statistical computing.  In this webinar, Dr. Ranney will discuss new features and show examples of the new functionality, which extend the platform’s usability, integration and scalability

 

Blogging Stats

Some statistics on blogs by the people who host them-

1) Tumblr

http://www.tumblr.com/about

12,917,771,050 TOTAL POSTS
34,669,313 TOTAL BLOGS
42,559,168  POSTS TODAY
2) WordPress
66,286,719 WordPress Sites in the World
I found no stats by Blogger or by Drupal but by using Google Trends.
From Google Trends-
blogger 
3.00
drupal 
1.00
sharepoint 
2.20
wordpress 
3.6
tumblr 
2.20

The all new Blogging in Blogger

I had given up on Blogspot ever having a makeover in favor of the nice themes at

wordpress, but man, the new CEO at google is really shaking some stuff here.

Check out the nice features for customizing the themes at Blogspot

Continue reading “The all new Blogging in Blogger”

Ethics and Writing

A particularly prominent technology blogger ( see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/michael_arrington_the_kingmaker_who_would_be_king.php )has now formalized his status as an investor (which he did even before) while relinquishing his editorial duties (which were not much given the blog’s acquisition by AOL and its own formidable line of writers, each one of whom is quite influential). Without going into either sermon mode (thou shall not have conflict of interests) or adulatory mode (wow he sold the blog for 30 mill and now he gets another 20 mill for his funds)- I shall try and present the case for ethics and ethical lapses while as a writer.

Continue reading “Ethics and Writing”

Search Engine Advertising sweet spot for arbitrage.

Assume I am a blogger using both Adsense and Adwords.

Suppose Adwords costs me X dollars per click, and Adsense pays me Y dollars per click.

Then a unique arbitrage opportunity would arise if

Y times CTR on my blog > X times CTR on my Ad Campaign

Is it possible. Theoretically yes? Long Tail of Internet yes.

However since there is a lag of time in which the Rates would converge , the Adsense rate would go lower or Adwords rate would go higher

Is there a tool that you can use to pump keywords with short times arbitrage opportunities , much like trading algols and quants do in finance.

Just asking !

 Hint- Its a trick math puzzle 🙂

 

%d bloggers like this: