English Class Notes
Chrome passes Internet Explorer to become world’s most popular browser
By Dan Graziano | BGR News – 5 hrs ago
RELATED CONTENT
-
Chrome passes Internet Explorer …
to remove a king or queen from power
2 to remove someone from a position of authority or importance :
an attempt to dethrone the senator
He dethroned Tyson in a fight that shook the boxing world.
According to new numbers from StatCounter, however, Google’s browser has finally averaged higher traffic than Internet Explorer for the first time over a full seven-day stretch. From May 14th through May 20th, the Internet giant’s Web browser garnered a 32.76% share, ahead of Microsoft’s 31.94%
gar‧ner [transitive]
formal to take or collect something, especially information or support [↪ glean]:
The party garnered 70 percent of the vote.
and Mozilla Firefox’s 25.47% share. At the start of this week, however, Chrome’s share began to slide, falling to 31.88%, just ahead of Internet Explorer’s 31.47% share.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: May 14, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg,Facebook’s chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history.
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
Now what?
As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders.
The answer lies in what Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people.
Facebook’s shares are expected to begin trading as early as this week. Already, lots of investors are scrambling to buy those shares, with giddy hopes that it will become a big moneymaker like Google. Because of that high demand, Facebook is expected to increase its offering price from its initial range, giving the company a valuation possibly as high as $104 billion.
In the eight years since it sprang out of a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has signed up users at breakneck speed, kept them glued to the site for longer stretches of time and turned a profit by using their personal information to customize the ads they see.
Whether it can spin that data into enough gold to justify a valuation of as much as $104 billion remains unclear.
“We know Facebook has an awful lot of data, but what they have not worked out yet is the most effective means of using that data for advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are going to have to experiment a lot more.”
Analysts, investors and company executives can rattle off any number of challenges facing the company. As it works to better match ads to people, it has to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny. It needs to find other ways to generate revenue, like allowing people to buy more goods and services with Facebook Credits, a kind of virtual currency. Most urgently it has to make money on mobile devices, the window to Facebook for more and more people.
All the while, its ability to innovate with new features and approaches — to “break things,” in the words of Mr. Zuckerberg — may be markedly constrained once it has investors to answer to.
“They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto ‘Done is better than perfect,’ ” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “When you’re operating as a public company, life is very different. We haven’t seen that play out yet. It’s going to take a few quarters to figure out what a public Facebook is going to look like.”
Skeptics point out that the company’s revenue growth showed signs of slowing in the first quarter of 2012. And a Bloomberg survey of 1,253 investors, analysts and traders found that a substantial majority were dubious about the eye-popping valuation Facebook was seeking. “It’s a risky asset. No doubt about that,” said Brian Wieser, of Pivotal Research Group. “Google was less risky.” No matter. Mr. Wieser says he thinks that Facebook is worth $83 billion and that its revenue will grow by at least 30 percent for the next five years.
The comparisons to Google are inevitable. When that company went public in 2004, there were so many doubters that the company lowered its offering price to $85 a share. It closed at just over $100 on the first day of trading, and now sells for more than $600. Facebook is farther along than Google was in terms of revenue, having brought in nearly $4 billion last year, or $5.11 a user, compared with Google’s $2 billion in 2003.
One Facebook investor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of market regulations as the offering draws near, noted that when Google went public it already had a clear business strategy. By contrast, he described Facebook this way: “They have built an incredibly valuable asset — as opposed to a business they have executed well.”
The most pressing issue for Facebook executives may be the mobile challenge. Already, over half of Facebook’s 901 million users access the site through mobile devices. In regulatory filings, the company says mobile use is growing fastest in some of Facebook’s largest markets, including the United States, India and Brazil. Facebook goes on to acknowledge that it makes little to no money on mobile and that “our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
There is not much space on mobile screens to show advertisements. And Google and Apple, two of Facebook’s biggest rivals, control the basic software on most smartphones, which could make it harder for the company to make inroads there. Facebook’s response to this challenge so far has been to aggressively acquire companies focused on mobile, including Instagram, for which it paid $1 billion in April. But it warned in a revision to its offering documents last week that the mobile shift meant it was adding users faster than it was increasing the number of ads it displayed.
What Facebook already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the site. Americans, on average, now spend 20 percent of their online time on Facebook alone, thanks to the ever-growing menu of activities the company has introduced, from playing games to sampling music to posting pictures of baby showers and drunken escapades. Some 300 million photos are uploaded to the site daily.
How Facebook exploits its users’ information — and how those users react — is the next reckoning. David Eastman, worldwide digital director for the advertising agency JWT, said Facebook would need to give marketers more data about what kinds of users click on what kinds of advertising, and about their travels on the Internet before and after they click on an ad. Most brands want to have a presence on Facebook, he said, but they do not quite understand who sees their pitches and whether they lead to greater sales.
“They need to make the data work more,” Mr. Eastman said. “They need to provide deeper data. Right now the value of Facebook advertising is largely unknown.”
While the bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes from North America, it is banking on international growth. The company has expanded its global footprint so rapidly that four out of five Facebook users are now outside the United States. It is the dominant social network in large emerging markets like Brazil and India, though it shows no signs of penetrating China — where it would face not only government censorship but stiff competition from homegrown social networks.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who has studied Mandarin, signaled his ambitions to crack the vast Chinese market as far back as 2010. He suggested that Facebook would first try to advance deeper into markets like Russia and Japan before it took on a country as “complex” as China.
With international growth comes international regulatory headaches. Facebook already faces audits in Europe on whether the company is living up to promises made to consumers about how it uses their data — and now, a stringent new data protection law. In India, it has been sued for spreading offensive content. And in the United States, it faces privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission for the next 20 years. In its offering documents, Facebook repeatedly warns of legislative and regulatory scrutiny over user privacy, “which may adversely affect our reputation and brand.”
Maintaining brand loyalty is excruciatingly difficult in the Internet business. Across Silicon Valley, investors are plotting the next big thing in social networks. Already, the clock may be ticking for Facebook.
“There is no consumer-facing Internet brand or site that ever keeps consumers’ attention for more than 10 years,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “It is not hard to imagine that in 10 years, people are going to be off of Facebook even.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has an answer to that. In the video for investors released this month, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at the ambitions he had for the company. Facebook, in his vision, will hook itself into the rest of the Web, making itself indispensable. Already Facebook serves as a de facto Internet passport, allowing users to log in with their Facebook identities and explore millions of other Web sites and applications.
“I think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way,” Mr. Zuckerberg says in the video. “We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”
Facebook Co-Founder: America is OK. It’s the Rules That Are a Pain
By John D. McKinnon | The Wall Street Journal – 9 hours ago
Mr. Saverin, who now lives in Singapore, decided last year to renounce his U.S. citizenship, a decision that was made public a few days ago. The move sparked an outcry among some tax experts who suspect he’s aiming to save on taxes. Although Mr. Saverin will have to pay a hefty exit tax for renouncing his citizenship, based on some calculation of his assets, Singapore is a relatively low-tax jurisdiction, particularly for foreign investors, and does not levy capital gains tax. Thus he could save in the longer term.
[More from WSJ.com: How Facebook's Elite Skirt Estate Tax]
In a political environment that’s rife with talk of raising taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Saverin’s case could become another flash point.
Saverin spokesman Tom Goodman said Sunday his renunciation was prompted not by tax considerations but by U.S. rules that make it more difficult for U.S. citizens to live and invest overseas.
“U.S. citizens are severely restricted as to what they can invest in and where they can maintain accounts,” said spokesman Tom Goodman. “Many foreign funds and banks won’t accept Americans. This was a financial rather than a tax motive.”
[More from WSJ.com: The Facebook-Free Baby]
It’s true many U.S. expats complain that American rules are making life more difficult for them. Those include the U.S. tax system’s global reach (many countries tax based on residency); foreign bank account reporting rules; and the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires foreign financial institutions to start reporting to the IRS on U.S. citizens’ accounts.
Expats say as a result of all the regulations, some foreign banks are dumping more U.S. customers. Mr. Goodman also cited FATCA, among other rules, as a problem for Mr. Saverin.
[More from WSJ.com: How Facebook Could Trip Up Investors]
Treasury Department officials say they don’t see evidence of a systemic problem for Americans living abroad arising from FATCA. People as wealthy as Mr. Saverin tend to have an easier time untangling red tape than the average U.S. retiree living abroad.
The spokesman said Mr. Saverin plans to continue to invest in tech companies around the world, including the U.S.
“His decision had nothing to do with dissatisfaction here, but with his strong desire to do business there,” Mr. Goodman said. He also plans a charitable foundation.
Chrome passes Internet Explorer to become world’s most popular browser
By Dan Graziano | BGR News – 5 hrs ago
RELATED CONTENT
-
Chrome passes Internet Explorer …
to remove a king or queen from power
2 to remove someone from a position of authority or importance :
an attempt to dethrone the senator
He dethroned Tyson in a fight that shook the boxing world.
According to new numbers from StatCounter, however, Google’s browser has finally averaged higher traffic than Internet Explorer for the first time over a full seven-day stretch. From May 14th through May 20th, the Internet giant’s Web browser garnered a 32.76% share, ahead of Microsoft’s 31.94%
gar‧ner [transitive]
formal to take or collect something, especially information or support [↪ glean]:
The party garnered 70 percent of the vote.
and Mozilla Firefox’s 25.47% share. At the start of this week, however, Chrome’s share began to slide, falling to 31.88%, just ahead of Internet Explorer’s 31.47% share.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: May 14, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg,Facebook’s chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history.
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
Now what?
As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders.
The answer lies in what Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people.
Facebook’s shares are expected to begin trading as early as this week. Already, lots of investors are scrambling to buy those shares, with giddy hopes that it will become a big moneymaker like Google. Because of that high demand, Facebook is expected to increase its offering price from its initial range, giving the company a valuation possibly as high as $104 billion.
In the eight years since it sprang out of a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has signed up users at breakneck speed, kept them glued to the site for longer stretches of time and turned a profit by using their personal information to customize the ads they see.
Whether it can spin that data into enough gold to justify a valuation of as much as $104 billion remains unclear.
“We know Facebook has an awful lot of data, but what they have not worked out yet is the most effective means of using that data for advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are going to have to experiment a lot more.”
Analysts, investors and company executives can rattle off any number of challenges facing the company. As it works to better match ads to people, it has to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny. It needs to find other ways to generate revenue, like allowing people to buy more goods and services with Facebook Credits, a kind of virtual currency. Most urgently it has to make money on mobile devices, the window to Facebook for more and more people.
All the while, its ability to innovate with new features and approaches — to “break things,” in the words of Mr. Zuckerberg — may be markedly constrained once it has investors to answer to.
“They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto ‘Done is better than perfect,’ ” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “When you’re operating as a public company, life is very different. We haven’t seen that play out yet. It’s going to take a few quarters to figure out what a public Facebook is going to look like.”
Skeptics point out that the company’s revenue growth showed signs of slowing in the first quarter of 2012. And a Bloomberg survey of 1,253 investors, analysts and traders found that a substantial majority were dubious about the eye-popping valuation Facebook was seeking. “It’s a risky asset. No doubt about that,” said Brian Wieser, of Pivotal Research Group. “Google was less risky.” No matter. Mr. Wieser says he thinks that Facebook is worth $83 billion and that its revenue will grow by at least 30 percent for the next five years.
The comparisons to Google are inevitable. When that company went public in 2004, there were so many doubters that the company lowered its offering price to $85 a share. It closed at just over $100 on the first day of trading, and now sells for more than $600. Facebook is farther along than Google was in terms of revenue, having brought in nearly $4 billion last year, or $5.11 a user, compared with Google’s $2 billion in 2003.
One Facebook investor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of market regulations as the offering draws near, noted that when Google went public it already had a clear business strategy. By contrast, he described Facebook this way: “They have built an incredibly valuable asset — as opposed to a business they have executed well.”
The most pressing issue for Facebook executives may be the mobile challenge. Already, over half of Facebook’s 901 million users access the site through mobile devices. In regulatory filings, the company says mobile use is growing fastest in some of Facebook’s largest markets, including the United States, India and Brazil. Facebook goes on to acknowledge that it makes little to no money on mobile and that “our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
There is not much space on mobile screens to show advertisements. And Google and Apple, two of Facebook’s biggest rivals, control the basic software on most smartphones, which could make it harder for the company to make inroads there. Facebook’s response to this challenge so far has been to aggressively acquire companies focused on mobile, including Instagram, for which it paid $1 billion in April. But it warned in a revision to its offering documents last week that the mobile shift meant it was adding users faster than it was increasing the number of ads it displayed.
What Facebook already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the site. Americans, on average, now spend 20 percent of their online time on Facebook alone, thanks to the ever-growing menu of activities the company has introduced, from playing games to sampling music to posting pictures of baby showers and drunken escapades. Some 300 million photos are uploaded to the site daily.
How Facebook exploits its users’ information — and how those users react — is the next reckoning. David Eastman, worldwide digital director for the advertising agency JWT, said Facebook would need to give marketers more data about what kinds of users click on what kinds of advertising, and about their travels on the Internet before and after they click on an ad. Most brands want to have a presence on Facebook, he said, but they do not quite understand who sees their pitches and whether they lead to greater sales.
“They need to make the data work more,” Mr. Eastman said. “They need to provide deeper data. Right now the value of Facebook advertising is largely unknown.”
While the bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes from North America, it is banking on international growth. The company has expanded its global footprint so rapidly that four out of five Facebook users are now outside the United States. It is the dominant social network in large emerging markets like Brazil and India, though it shows no signs of penetrating China — where it would face not only government censorship but stiff competition from homegrown social networks.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who has studied Mandarin, signaled his ambitions to crack the vast Chinese market as far back as 2010. He suggested that Facebook would first try to advance deeper into markets like Russia and Japan before it took on a country as “complex” as China.
With international growth comes international regulatory headaches. Facebook already faces audits in Europe on whether the company is living up to promises made to consumers about how it uses their data — and now, a stringent new data protection law. In India, it has been sued for spreading offensive content. And in the United States, it faces privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission for the next 20 years. In its offering documents, Facebook repeatedly warns of legislative and regulatory scrutiny over user privacy, “which may adversely affect our reputation and brand.”
Maintaining brand loyalty is excruciatingly difficult in the Internet business. Across Silicon Valley, investors are plotting the next big thing in social networks. Already, the clock may be ticking for Facebook.
“There is no consumer-facing Internet brand or site that ever keeps consumers’ attention for more than 10 years,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “It is not hard to imagine that in 10 years, people are going to be off of Facebook even.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has an answer to that. In the video for investors released this month, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at the ambitions he had for the company. Facebook, in his vision, will hook itself into the rest of the Web, making itself indispensable. Already Facebook serves as a de facto Internet passport, allowing users to log in with their Facebook identities and explore millions of other Web sites and applications.
“I think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way,” Mr. Zuckerberg says in the video. “We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”
Facebook Co-Founder: America is OK. It’s the Rules That Are a Pain
Chrome passes Internet Explorer to become world’s most popular browser
By Dan Graziano | BGR News – 5 hrs ago
RELATED CONTENT
-
Chrome passes Internet Explorer …
to remove a king or queen from power
2 to remove someone from a position of authority or importance :
an attempt to dethrone the senator
He dethroned Tyson in a fight that shook the boxing world.
According to new numbers from StatCounter, however, Google’s browser has finally averaged higher traffic than Internet Explorer for the first time over a full seven-day stretch. From May 14th through May 20th, the Internet giant’s Web browser garnered a 32.76% share, ahead of Microsoft’s 31.94%
gar‧ner [transitive]
formal to take or collect something, especially information or support [↪ glean]:
The party garnered 70 percent of the vote.
and Mozilla Firefox’s 25.47% share. At the start of this week, however, Chrome’s share began to slide, falling to 31.88%, just ahead of Internet Explorer’s 31.47% share.
Chrome passes Internet Explorer to become world’s most popular browser
By Dan Graziano | BGR News – 5 hrs agoRELATED CONTENT
- Chrome passes Internet Explorer …
Google’s Chrome Web browser has continued to gain market sharesince its introduction in 2008. Despite surpassing Internet Explorer in select regions and on weekends, Google’s browser has never been able to dethrone Microsoft in global usage share.
de‧throne [transitive]
1 to remove a king or queen from power
2 to remove someone from a position of authority or importance :
an attempt to dethrone the senator
an attempt to dethrone the senatorHe dethroned Tyson in a fight that shook the boxing world.
According to new numbers from StatCounter, however, Google’s browser has finally averaged higher traffic than Internet Explorer for the first time over a full seven-day stretch. From May 14th through May 20th, the Internet giant’s Web browser garnered a 32.76% share, ahead of Microsoft’s 31.94%
gar‧ner [transitive]
formal to take or collect something, especially information or support [↪ glean]:
The party garnered 70 percent of the vote.
The party garnered 70 percent of the vote.
and Mozilla Firefox’s 25.47% share. At the start of this week, however, Chrome’s share began to slide, falling to 31.88%, just ahead of Internet Explorer’s 31.47% share.
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: May 14, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg,Facebook’s chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history.
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
Now what?
As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders.
The answer lies in what Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people.
Facebook’s shares are expected to begin trading as early as this week. Already, lots of investors are scrambling to buy those shares, with giddy hopes that it will become a big moneymaker like Google. Because of that high demand, Facebook is expected to increase its offering price from its initial range, giving the company a valuation possibly as high as $104 billion.
In the eight years since it sprang out of a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has signed up users at breakneck speed, kept them glued to the site for longer stretches of time and turned a profit by using their personal information to customize the ads they see.
Whether it can spin that data into enough gold to justify a valuation of as much as $104 billion remains unclear.
“We know Facebook has an awful lot of data, but what they have not worked out yet is the most effective means of using that data for advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are going to have to experiment a lot more.”
Analysts, investors and company executives can rattle off any number of challenges facing the company. As it works to better match ads to people, it has to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny. It needs to find other ways to generate revenue, like allowing people to buy more goods and services with Facebook Credits, a kind of virtual currency. Most urgently it has to make money on mobile devices, the window to Facebook for more and more people.
All the while, its ability to innovate with new features and approaches — to “break things,” in the words of Mr. Zuckerberg — may be markedly constrained once it has investors to answer to.
“They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto ‘Done is better than perfect,’ ” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “When you’re operating as a public company, life is very different. We haven’t seen that play out yet. It’s going to take a few quarters to figure out what a public Facebook is going to look like.”
Skeptics point out that the company’s revenue growth showed signs of slowing in the first quarter of 2012. And a Bloomberg survey of 1,253 investors, analysts and traders found that a substantial majority were dubious about the eye-popping valuation Facebook was seeking. “It’s a risky asset. No doubt about that,” said Brian Wieser, of Pivotal Research Group. “Google was less risky.” No matter. Mr. Wieser says he thinks that Facebook is worth $83 billion and that its revenue will grow by at least 30 percent for the next five years.
The comparisons to Google are inevitable. When that company went public in 2004, there were so many doubters that the company lowered its offering price to $85 a share. It closed at just over $100 on the first day of trading, and now sells for more than $600. Facebook is farther along than Google was in terms of revenue, having brought in nearly $4 billion last year, or $5.11 a user, compared with Google’s $2 billion in 2003.
One Facebook investor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of market regulations as the offering draws near, noted that when Google went public it already had a clear business strategy. By contrast, he described Facebook this way: “They have built an incredibly valuable asset — as opposed to a business they have executed well.”
The most pressing issue for Facebook executives may be the mobile challenge. Already, over half of Facebook’s 901 million users access the site through mobile devices. In regulatory filings, the company says mobile use is growing fastest in some of Facebook’s largest markets, including the United States, India and Brazil. Facebook goes on to acknowledge that it makes little to no money on mobile and that “our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”
Multimedia
Related
The Education of Mark Zuckerberg (May 13, 2012)
There is not much space on mobile screens to show advertisements. And Google and Apple, two of Facebook’s biggest rivals, control the basic software on most smartphones, which could make it harder for the company to make inroads there. Facebook’s response to this challenge so far has been to aggressively acquire companies focused on mobile, including Instagram, for which it paid $1 billion in April. But it warned in a revision to its offering documents last week that the mobile shift meant it was adding users faster than it was increasing the number of ads it displayed.
What Facebook already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the site. Americans, on average, now spend 20 percent of their online time on Facebook alone, thanks to the ever-growing menu of activities the company has introduced, from playing games to sampling music to posting pictures of baby showers and drunken escapades. Some 300 million photos are uploaded to the site daily.
How Facebook exploits its users’ information — and how those users react — is the next reckoning. David Eastman, worldwide digital director for the advertising agency JWT, said Facebook would need to give marketers more data about what kinds of users click on what kinds of advertising, and about their travels on the Internet before and after they click on an ad. Most brands want to have a presence on Facebook, he said, but they do not quite understand who sees their pitches and whether they lead to greater sales.
“They need to make the data work more,” Mr. Eastman said. “They need to provide deeper data. Right now the value of Facebook advertising is largely unknown.”
While the bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes from North America, it is banking on international growth. The company has expanded its global footprint so rapidly that four out of five Facebook users are now outside the United States. It is the dominant social network in large emerging markets like Brazil and India, though it shows no signs of penetrating China — where it would face not only government censorship but stiff competition from homegrown social networks.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who has studied Mandarin, signaled his ambitions to crack the vast Chinese market as far back as 2010. He suggested that Facebook would first try to advance deeper into markets like Russia and Japan before it took on a country as “complex” as China.
With international growth comes international regulatory headaches. Facebook already faces audits in Europe on whether the company is living up to promises made to consumers about how it uses their data — and now, a stringent new data protection law. In India, it has been sued for spreading offensive content. And in the United States, it faces privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission for the next 20 years. In its offering documents, Facebook repeatedly warns of legislative and regulatory scrutiny over user privacy, “which may adversely affect our reputation and brand.”
Maintaining brand loyalty is excruciatingly difficult in the Internet business. Across Silicon Valley, investors are plotting the next big thing in social networks. Already, the clock may be ticking for Facebook.
“There is no consumer-facing Internet brand or site that ever keeps consumers’ attention for more than 10 years,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “It is not hard to imagine that in 10 years, people are going to be off of Facebook even.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has an answer to that. In the video for investors released this month, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at the ambitions he had for the company. Facebook, in his vision, will hook itself into the rest of the Web, making itself indispensable. Already Facebook serves as a de facto Internet passport, allowing users to log in with their Facebook identities and explore millions of other Web sites and applications.
“I think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way,” Mr. Zuckerberg says in the video. “We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”
By John D. McKinnon | The Wall Street Journal – 9 hours ago
Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who gave up his U.S. citizenship, has nothing against the U.S., just its complicated rules on U.S. citizens holding money overseas, a spokesman said.
Mr. Saverin, who now lives in Singapore, decided last year to renounce his U.S. citizenship, a decision that was made public a few days ago. The move sparked an outcry among some tax experts who suspect he’s aiming to save on taxes. Although Mr. Saverin will have to pay a hefty exit tax for renouncing his citizenship, based on some calculation of his assets, Singapore is a relatively low-tax jurisdiction, particularly for foreign investors, and does not levy capital gains tax. Thus he could save in the longer term.
[More from WSJ.com: How Facebook's Elite Skirt Estate Tax]
In a political environment that’s rife with talk of raising taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Saverin’s case could become another flash point.
Saverin spokesman Tom Goodman said Sunday his renunciation was prompted not by tax considerations but by U.S. rules that make it more difficult for U.S. citizens to live and invest overseas.
“U.S. citizens are severely restricted as to what they can invest in and where they can maintain accounts,” said spokesman Tom Goodman. “Many foreign funds and banks won’t accept Americans. This was a financial rather than a tax motive.”
[More from WSJ.com: The Facebook-Free Baby]
[More from WSJ.com: How Facebook Could Trip Up Investors]
The spokesman said Mr. Saverin plans to continue to invest in tech companies around the world, including the U.S.
“His decision had nothing to do with dissatisfaction here, but with his strong desire to do business there,” Mr. Goodman said. He also plans a charitable foundation.
Raymond Wong takes off early to accompany pregnant wife
Yesterday Raymond Wong recording for the food program My Private Kitchen and cooked very well. He expressed that for Christmas, he hopes to make a feast to celebrate with his friends. As to if he will give a large Christmas gift to his first time pregnant wife? Raymond said: "All my friends are saying the same thing, actually nothing special, the happiest is that my wife's condition is stabled. (Has she been eating appropriately?) She eats anything. (Has she had mood swings or appetite changes?) Her back always feels unwell, and will complain a little, but understands."
Raymond avoided talking about if his wife will be having a boy, he was only willing to reveal that he's currently cleaning the house during his break and will buy baby supplies early. He said: "Currently we are preparing for the postpartum period, won't need to live together because mom and aunt will be helping out. (Taken off from TVB yet?) Yes I took 10 days off."
NEC's tactile touchscreen nudges at the future
tac‧tile
2 a tactile person likes to touch people, for example when talking to them
Apple to Disclose Plans For Its Cash Stockpile
A stockpile is a pile or storage location for bulk materials, forming part of the bulk material handling process.
============================
Hi-
Just a reminder – there will be no meeting at school for the next two weeks due to Spring Break… We will be visiting xxx in xxx for a week… I hope you will enjoy Spring Break – I’ll miss you…
========================
YouTube Subtracts Racy and Raucous to Add a Teaching Tool
rau‧cous
1 sounding unpleasantly loud:
He burst into raucous laughter.
raucous cheers
2 impolite, noisy, and violent:
A group of raucous students spilled out of the bar.
The atmosphere became increasingly raucous.
Delta teams up with Amazon to give you free WiFi access for in-flight shopping
team up with
If you team up with someone, you join them in order to work together for a particular purpose. You can also say that two people or groups team up.
- Elton teamed up with Eric Clapton to wow thousands at a Wembley rock concert...
- Recently a friend suggested that we team up for a working holiday in Europe in the summer.Intel intros Xeon E5-2600 family, finally ushers servers into the Sandy Bridge erausher [transitive always + adverb/preposition]
to help someone to get from one place to another, especially by showing them the way
usher in ↔ something
phrasal verbto cause something new to start, or to be at the start of something new :
沒有留言:
張貼留言