In case you were curious what time all the roosters start crowing in Hawaii.
4:45am
Tumbling Valuation?
A $1billion valuation for Tumblr is about 40-50% of what I would have expected (based upon the last Pinterest raise/val). If sold to Yahoo, I’d want as much cash as possible to mitigate clear risk vs. Facebook where I’d take 20-30% cash as a floor based on Instagram deal. If they are pricing on 10X expected 2013 revenue, that’s the wrong metric - not even in the right neighborhood in my opinion. Just my $.02.
Good point. I think all cash deal is being reported.
The comparison to Pinterest is interesting. I think most people would say that deal was overvalued (2.5B was it?) and it also proves the point that valuations tend to go down when consumer / social companies go from zero revenue to some revenue (ironically).
The decision Tumblr needs to make is how long and how likely is it that they can attain a cash valuation as good as $1B. Probably not a hard decision (sell out now!).
The more interesting question is why the hell would Yahoo pay a Billion for Tumblr? More ad inventory from a key demographic? Do they really know how to retain that audience and monetize it? Are the people (engineers) worth that much? Can you buy cool?
One reason to go to Hong Kong…
Bucket list?
Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor’s time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution? Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it’s about to do the same to higher ed.
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College Is Going Online, Whether We Like It Or Not - Zachary Karabell - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
Bullshit. Online Ed that is nothing but a talking professor sucks. Great online education costs money too, just in different places.
JFK -> Honolulu is 10.5 hours
Which means you have time to watch almost the entire first season of Homeland. Good show!
Bon voyage!
R and I are off to Hawaii for 10 days. We’ll be on the Big Island for a week, staying (for free!) with my uncle near Hilo, then 3 days in Kauai. Who knows, maybe by the time I get back, Yahoo will have bought Tumblr*.
*Tumblr has to sell. It’s a no brainer. Tumblr has not shown it knows how to monetize to a level that surpasses a $1B acquisition price. The investors need an out and a $1B sale would be a huge win. I’d feel differently if they’d gone down the e-commerce path I’ve been touting for the last 3-4 years, but doesn’t seem like that’s in the plan.
College enrollment in the spring-2013 term dropped by 2.3 percent compared with the same term a year ago, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Four-year, for-profit institutions saw the sharpest enrollment decline among higher-education sectors tracked in the report, with a fall of 8.7 percent. The report describes declines in every sector but four-year, private nonprofit institutions, whose spring-2013 enrollment grew by half a percentage point compared with the previous year.
Our age elevates the precision-tooled power of the algorithm over flawed human judgment. From web search to marketing and stock-trading, and even education and policing, the power of computers that crunch data according to complex sets of if-then rules is promised to make our lives better in every way. Automated retailers will tell you which book you want to read next; dating websites will compute your perfect life-partner; self-driving cars will reduce accidents; crime will be predicted and prevented algorithmically. If only we minimise the input of messy human minds, we can all have better decisions made for us. So runs the hard sell of our current algorithm fetish.
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Steven Poole – On algorithms (via infoneer-pulse)
Amazon had the humans compete against the algorithms for who was better merchandising. The algorithms won. Sorry but not sorry.
Think about the difference between a house (Germanic) and a mansion (French), or between starting something and commencing, between calling something kingly or regal. English has a huge number of close synonyms, where the major difference is the level of formality or prestige. The prestigious form is almost always the Latin one.
The names of animals and meats also reflect this phenomenon. The old story goes that, in English, the animals have Germanic names but the cooked meats have French ones. For example, swine is Germanic but pork is French, sheep is Germanic but mutton is French. Was this because the English speakers worked on the farms whereas the French speakers ate the produce? It’s certainly possible.
The research arm of dating site OKCupid looked at 500,000 first contacts and concluded that “netspeak, bad grammar and bad spelling are huge turn-offs”. The biggest passion killers were “ur”, “r”, “u”, “ya” and “cant”. Also damaging to online suitors were “luv” and “wat”.
On the other hand, correct use of apostrophes was appealing. Using “don’t” and “won’t” caused better than average response rates - 36% and 37% respectively, according to the research.
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Apostrophe now: Bad grammar and the people who hate it
Read: BBC News (via brooklynmutt)
You should try semi-colons.
