The first comic book to ever feature the Super-Man character, Action Comics #1 dated June 1938, was just sold for $1 million. Considering its original price of $0.10, this is an approx. 25% nominal and 21% real IRR for the past 72 years. Eat you heart out, Warren Buffett. Bonus links inside.
Buffett was particularly expansive regarding his processes and methods, and this alone makes this video worth the time (some 90 minutes). The fact that it was October 1998, a pivotal time in the dot-com boom and just after the LTCM imbroglio makes it even more interesting.
The AOL – TimeWarner merger’s 10-year anniversary inspires a feature in the NY Times, and the videos are a must-see for the candid opinions of the top execs involved. One must remember that talented fund managers got burned in 1998-1999 shorting AOL at a P/E of 100, 200, 300… only to see it reach 700. Not a typo, that’s the P/E ratio.
Zynga Games creates games for Facebook and MySpace. Its users number in the tens of millions, and many of them pay real cash for virtual goods to spice up their gaming. In fact, Zynga might well be making more money with Facebook than Facebook itself is. In paper, the business model seems great. We’ll probably get to know this soon, since Zynga is supposedly preparing for an IPO. Anyway it’s a huge reminder that disrupting technologies don’t necessarily imply that the inventors will make the most money – in some cases, any money. For new and old industries, always look at the entire value chain, be it suppliers, service providers, etc.
Free e-book organized by Seth Godin sounds a lot like the Red Balloon experience we just discussed on Dec. 6th: it’s less about advertising the authors’ work than it’s about discovering ways that content gets disseminated online – how does an e-book become “viral”? Interesting experiment, so-so book.
DARPA, the US military agency that 40 years ago spawned the Internet, organized a contest to study how people collaborate online and, most importantly, how information spreads virally through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The winning team took less than 9 hours to locate 10 balloons spread throughout the US – unthinkable maybe even 5 years ago… And the implications are quite interesting.
Trail-sniffing independent information providers with excellent business models, looking horizontally for opportunities. Some of these companies (Gartner, FactSet Research, ComScore, etc.) look like acquisition targets.
Facebook is just starting to tap the immense wealth of data generated by its 300mm audience, as reported in their blog and in the New York Times (free registration required) yesterday. This particular study on the “Happiness Index” is more of a teaser, a taste of what is to come. We don’t pretend to know [...]
Netflix is one of the most admirable cases around on corporate strategy AND execution. It shows how you can make billions out of simple things. That said, they have to kill a lion a year to stay ahead. Investment-wise, we never got to the point where we felt we knew enough to invest in them – and don’t regret not doing it.
Continue reading about Netflix doing the right things at the right time
The Netflix Prize has been awarded and it’s a great example of crowdsourcing. But is such “open collaboration” a tool for every situation? How open do you really want to be? Some are looking at his and saying “hold your horses”. That’s always good advice in our book.
Continue reading about Netflix’s smart crowdsourcing initiative