Pubblicità online e l’opportunità cinese
Da un ricerca da parte di Magnaglobal, pare emergere che le aziende che stanno investendo i propri capitali nella pubblicità in Cina non si siano accordi della forte presenza di persone che passano gran parte della propria giornata su internet con un numero di utenti in trend fortemente positivo.
Cina, il nuovo impero digitale
Sebbene la Cina sia considerata ancora da molti come uno dei mercati emergenti in molti settori, non si può dire lo stesso per quanto riguarda Internet e il web.
Secondo uno studio effettuato dal Boston Consulting group (sulla base di dati provenienti da svariate fonti, tra le quali il China Internet Network Information Center) infatti, entro il 2015 si aggiungeranno altri 200 Milioni di utenti alla già impressionante cifra di 700 Milioni di navigatori cinesi. Circa il doppio degli utenti di Stati Uniti e Giappone messi insieme. Cifre che fanno sicuramente girare la testa, se si pensa anche che il paese potrebbe quasi sicuramente diventare il mercato online di vendita al dettaglio più grande al mondo da qui a pochi anni.
Già, perché gli utenti cinesi non si limitano più a navigare per puro intrattenimento personale, ascoltando la musica o guardando video sulle controparti orientali di Youtube (Tudou e Youku), come facevano nei primi anni di sviluppo di Internet dalla loro parti, ma si sono evoluti. Il loro livello di confort è cresciuto e adesso si interessano a una serie di attività più vasta tra le quali la più importante è l’e-commerce. Read More…
Instagram Business Model? Facebook Acquisition
Photo by franzrusso
As you know yesterday Facebook as acquired the mobile photo giant Instagram.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering what could have the future reserved for Instagram, because I couldn’t figure out how the company would have monetized. The service is indeed free for everyone, starting from the app to the photo hosting, and since they haven’t put any interest in creating profile pages that people could visit from outside the app, there was quite no way to have some profit. I thought about selling promoted photos to show in the timeline, or promoted profiles, but for a company with such a service it wouldn’t have been enought.
And then.. here comes the acquisition. 1 Billion Dollars.
I’m pretty impressed by this decision from Palo Alto, the money spent does really worth the value? For me not, and I have quite some good reasons for saying this.
Zuck says that they are “committed to building and growing Instagram independently“, this means that they will not shut down trhe service, and this is really a good piece of news. Fact is that (always from Mark statement), the know how of the team will be used to improve the photo sharing features of the most famous social network. My point is.. If you were interested in developing your mobile app by implementing some vintage look to the shots, why don’t you use your many developers and just do that? I mean.. Insted of paying 1 billion dollar, you could have done it with just a few thousand.
1 Billion dollar spent in a company that doesn’t even have many chances to monetize, just a few days before the debut in the stocks market. We don’t also know the real value of Facebook until they do the IPO too, and from my point of view, and from their balance, they are already overvalued!
I think this probably the beginning of a new bubble.. the #socialbubble . We have already seen an example with Groupon that has lost great part of their value since the stock debut in the NASDAQ, who will be the next?
Tell me your opinions
Related articles
- Facebook, Instagram, and Ads (macstories.net)
- Why Facebook Bought Instagram (macstories.net)
- Facebook, Instagram e la paura della bolla (marketingcaffe.com)
Analysis: Twitter reaction to Steve Job’s death
Image via CrunchBase
I was wondering how the death of the poor Steve Jobs has influenced social medias, in this particular case twitter.
With a short search on tredistic I’ve noticed that the messages with the word “Steve” reached the 17.6% of the tweets at 2AM GMT+2, and slowly fading down, with another lower peak of 8,5% of “twitter share” around 9AM when Europe was waking up.
What’s also interesting is that before the sad announce, the conversations about Steve Jobs and his health status was around zero and then they did an exponential growth. Now, a day later his death, the buzz is slowly going back to zero again as a sign that most people was talking about that because they felt obliged to follow the trend of speaking and honor that awesome person.
As you can see in the chart below, even the conversation about Apple did not reach such a level of conversation during the keynote presenting the iPhone 4s, and did a big leap on the wave of Steve’s death.
What is Credit Rating: meaning and why it’s so important
Rating (def.) is a synthetic evalutation made by an external independent subject, on the ability and will of a borrower, to face the payment of the capital and interests, related to an emission of debt securities, placed or to be placed, as stated in the contractual obligation.
To be more simple it consists of an alphanumerical symbol that can be easily understood and interpreted by anyone, and it’s useful because with just a letter or a number you can compare different emission with ease.
But probably you are wondering why rating and rating agencies wear such an important role in markets, and why their decision can influence investors so much.
That’s simple.. Rating is a very important cognitive element in determination of the interest rate payed by the borrower. The interest rate is in fact composed by 2 elements:
- the benchmark (fixed): that is the distinctive rate for securities with the same duration and structure, and express the needs of units in deficit (borrowers).
- spread (variable): that express the needs of units in surplus (investors), and changes based on the perception of risk of the issuer.
Steve Jobs 1955-2011
”No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Steve Jobs – Stanford University 2005
What is Quantitative Easing
There’re a lot of talks about quantitative easing in this period, both from the ECB than from the FED. For those of you who doesn’t know what the news are talking about here is a short and clear video that explains the maneuver.
Basically this is done to lower the interests ratios, but too much of it could cause inflation, and that’s what the ECB prefers not to do, a high inflation indeed could cause even a worse scenario of the actual one. And that is why the ECB said that this measure could not be considered as a long-term solution to the problems of Europe and Italy in particular.
Italian government and Italy need to do something more structural to enforce the growth of the country and sanitize the balance.
Italy and innovation
In the last times I am wondering what is the situation of Italian companies and which is the future of their economy, taking in consideration the steps that are being taken in innovation, research and development from both the government and the companies themselves.
From my point of view they are really awful, I mean, there’s no doubt that we are in an difficult phase for our economy and this bad economic conjuncture effects are lasting for more than expected, but, when I say awful I’m saying that we are navigating in bad waters more than we notice or think.
Of course there are big multinationals that are investing a lot in R&D or online customer relationship or whatever strategy that uses the power of IT [there’s one in particular near where I live (Brembo), that has even created a park for scientific development and it’s going to be huge], but most of the small and mid firms don’t even know the potential of some simple yet cheap instruments that internet offers to them. For example, few of them has a simple facebook page and updates it regularly, or use a twitter account for interating with their customers, very few industrial companies use a voip client to keep in contact with their supply chain, and even fewer take advantage the virtualization to empower the production line and their control system.
Problem is that those small companies are the real engine of the Italian economy, and if they don’t wake up , they will be literally eaten by the asian competitors.
Besides this, let’s assume that a company has the ideas to implement an “online” strategy, which are the investments of the government for creating a solid infrastructure to sustain those business? None.
The possibilities to have a really high speed connection, like in fiber, are remote or the costs are prohibitive. Italians copper lines are too old and the pairs are always overloaded. There are no economic district where to do some joint venture. We are now (now!) investing in the high speed trains, and there’s still someone that does not understand the importance of them. We are years back.
We keep sustaining old big companies just to not lose our face internationally (it’s too late Italians!), and keep giving subsidies to the banks. Gosh.. If they cannot stand up with their own legs or they don’t fall within the european requirement, it means that there’s something that doesn’t work!! We have people to the power that only look to their interests, and I’m not biasing saying this.
Even a lot of young students are blind in front of this disastrous country, and most of them are even contributing to it by wasting their relatives’ money enrolling to university just because they don’t want to go to work.
Maybe, fortunately, not everything is lost, we have some young talented people that are creating some great startups, don’t make them escape abroad.
Programming and stock exchange – HFT
At first I want to do a small introduction on how markets work: once upon a time, operators could make some money through the inefficency of the market just with a telephone, by buying from a market and selling a few minutes later in another market to an higher price and gain from the price difference, this was possible because stock exchanges were not integrated as today with a computerized system, and before differences in prices could adjust from a place to another it would have taken a few minutes.
Nowadays this is not as much possible to take advantage of this inefficency, because prices are the same all over the world, and for example, if you are looking for a stock price on a screen, it would be the same whether you were in Hong Kong or in New York.
This is possible because of information technology that, as everyone know, is becoming always more important by making the world to become smaller and smaller. Connecting one place to another in just a fraction of a second.
This is the point. Fraction of a second
The prices, as I said, adjust quite instantly all over the world, so that a human could not notice or profit by this small amount of time. Thing is, it is too fast! even if you tap continuously on a button.. and you couldn’t even determine if the price in that blink has raised or decreased.
Here it comes algorithmic trading or robo-trading, and in particular a special class of algorithmic trading which is called “high-frequency trading” (HFT), “in which computers make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe“. Wiki
We are talking of very small amount of time, nanoseconds, that just a machine could use. And if a developer could create an algorithm that is both efficient and fast enough to beat the competition it could become very rich.
Literally, this is a “millions dollars affair”, indeed some societies such as banks, hedge funds and main investors, are already developing their own systems to make million dollars profits a year. A great opportunity of job and profit for both investors and developers, in a branch that will be on the daily agenda of the next (not so far) future.
Algorithm will be the new trading operators.
The hard life of a nerd.. 