Well if this is not a sign of a bubble building then what is as far as investing $240 million in a company goes for Microsoft well it is no big deal for a company who is having close to $6.6 billion in cash reserves but the question remains why would microsoft give out such a huge amount for such a small stake in a company which does not have a solid business model yet the rumors floating around is that facebook is planning to monetize its user base by launching its own ad network. Well yes good that is very good but for how long can a social network claim they have a active user base well the normal trend now is where your friends move you move.

For example I was on hi5 then moved to orkut and now am very active on facebook and orkut.  I don’t even bother much to login to my hi5 account to check it as my friends are no longer active on that so what does facebook believe will not give another startup an opportunity  to come and swoop  all its users to their network  will facebook be able to maintain its user base after all it is a plain vanilla social network it is no  yahoo or google where there is not just one thing but many things that can be done with one id you get mail, social network,shopping etc etc yes facebook has opened their platform to third party developers but so are other networks.

I am really struggling to understand why Microsoft would value facebook so much when myspace is termed as the king of social networks and I recently read somewhere that it is valued at $10 billion  now when the market leader is valued at $10 billion and and upcoming star is valued at $15 billion based on factors like opening up the network to outside developers which other competitors can easily copy and are copying and opening to third party developers.

Well bubble or no it is good news for all tech entrepreneurs as it shows that the market is right for tech ideas and the VC’s are willing to invest in any ideas whether they are built on good business models or no.

As of now it looks like millions of users is more important then having a good business model

Oh if it can come with all the necessary cool gadgets and must haves like a missile launcher, a GPS tracking unit, a beer chiller,a nice music system, a TV with a satellite dish ya ya this is a lot to ask even without this gadgets the car is good to look at and also a technological marvel in a way I guess so a must have anyway once it hits the market and you don’t have to move around a lot on one charge for your vehicle I guess this vehicles would pick up and go mainstream if they could be recharged fast like even if it goes 200 km but if you could recharge the vehicle in say 5 minutes for another 200 km that would be perfect as then instead of gas stations you will see electric charging stations within the radius of 200 km.

Well this one is by Subaru and Nissan is also coming out with one but I wonder if there is any indian company other then Reva working on something like this as tata’s are too busy working on their 1 lakh Rs wonder car which I am very very anxious too see.

(image is linked from cnet site see the above linked article for more details about the car)

Just stumbled across (this) found it very very fascinating but would Google make such a purchase who knows but In my opinion don’t think so my reasons being the price tag is too big even for a company like Google with huge pile of cash and they can easily raise a bit more if needed to fund such a acquisition but will they be able to digest and integrate this into their offerings is what would be interesting to see if this does go through with the $54.13B price tag it can go more then that too.

Well with such an acquisition they would not just get a ready made hardware platform the blackberry but they also get a very important chunk of the corp clients who are users of the RIM platform so the only thing left for them would be integrating the hardware with their hosted applications for corporate domains and viola an enterprise class mobile collaboration suite and I guess that Google is bound to announce something huge since they have already taken their cash cow Adsense mobile so the Gphone is definitely on its way whether blackberry turns into a Gphone or there is another route Google will take only time will tell and their recent acquisition of zingku also shows their interest in the mobile space this is important for them in countries like India and China where the mobile penetration is more then PC penetration and they are definitely lagging in both this countries but so far Google’s mobile strategy has been a bit shaky am still wondering why they bought dodgeball some time back and their founders quit and left on an unhappy note with lot of media attention at their claims of how Google was not providing them with no resources to take the product further.

The fascinating part was how he built the 1st ever billion dollar company in the world by acquiring small steel companies and some big ones like Carnegie steel and then combining them to form the United States Steel Corporation In this deal what I found fascinating was the fact that when Mr Morgan went to meet the owner of Carnegie steel Mr Andrew Carnegie he was given on a piece of paper the sum that Mr Carnegie wanted for his firm on the piece of paper was the written the sum $480 Million and to this Mr Morgan said Done and that was it no due diligence, no evaluation, no lawyers, no power brokers that is plain old you tell me the price and I say yes or no the risk taking and the appetite of the Wild Wild West is not there in biz anymore just see the media circus around the Tata-Corrus deal and the arcelor-mittal deal the evaluations, market speculations etc etc where as the the biz deal between Mr Morgan and Mr Carnegie was between a buyer and a seller but in the modern world I guess this old fashion ways wont probably work. But then again Mr Morgan had another famous saying "If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it" with this attitude I guess he tackled the biz world too.

For anyone who wants to someday build a billion dollar enterprise Mr Morgan is the perfect role model during the rough days the sort of person who could twist the govt to their benefit and also predict the movement of the markets and also place wise bets over what will be successful.

To know a bit about this amazing biz figure check out (this) but this has just the minimum the other details which were shown in the history channels episode of biography are not there like what is corsair pact etc

The people who inspire me from the biz world are Bill Gates, Steve Job, Richard Branson and now Mr J. P. Morgan there will surely be more and more people added to this list as I explore the vast jungle of corporate biographies of people who build empires with vision and hard work and how it all began with a small dream and a small startup.

I was introduced to the world of social networking with the hi5 network and it was fun at that time to keep in touch with your friends then it started getting very very slow and then you saw the banner ads coming in and then constant server outage and at that point was fed up of it and then moved onto orkut and has been happy on that since joined on the zebo network since it belonged to a friend and was trying to promote it a bit (kinda like doing my part in helping a buddy) but recently with all the noise in the blogosphere and media about facebook and its wild wild 10 billion dollar evaluation finally i joined it to see what is it all about.

In short what I can say about facebook is too many attention grabbing elements on your profile which keep you distracted from one purpose that a social networking site serves and that is too connect with friends and like minded people. Am still happy with orkut and plan to stick to that and also be a bit active on facebook and see where it goes the rumors floating are that orkut will also be opening up their platform to third party developers well I guess at that point of time they will also become like facebook but till that time comes they will offer a much cleaner and better utility to connect to your peers.

Out of all I would say orkut is the one that is good and once they open up the api to outside world I guess they will grow a bit faster but what would really be good is if somehow google were able to convert gmail into a social networking app they have done it with integration of gtalk in the email client but in my opinion if gmail or yahoo or hotmail can offer the added layers ontop of the basic communication layer that an email app provides without hampering the communication layer then that has the potential to be the biggest social network ever.

Don’t forget you can go by for a few days without logging into a social network but you cant let a day go by without logging into your email account and till now that has been the primary source along with IM to stay in touch with your friends. Well if someone is listening then this is a million dollar idea

Go Gayle Go
Go Windies Go Make Me Proud

ok South africa’s reply has started hmm bad move I think Gayle should have opened the bowling that would have played into the minds of the South African batsmen and make them loose their cool this Sarwan is not good at mind games

well thats all for now me getting back to the match

The last few weeks have been hectic as well as eventful in my life
why you ask?
well
for one I quit my job yes yes I resigned from a nice 9 to 5 job (well it was a job it was not one of those cozy jobs where a person works from 9 to 5 goes home and at the beginning of the next month comes to collect the pay cheque for me the job was a lot more hectic then having my own venture)
why you ask again?
Well I suddenly got the bad uncontrollable itch of becoming a entrepreneur and so I did not with one venture but floating three ventures at a time yes yes I thought one would not be challenging enough so went ahead and started three yes if you are still in shock I said three ventures and more are in the pipeline but for the first year I just want to build this three up to become leaders in the sectors they are in and then move onto other challenges in other sectors.
so the three ventures are in nascent stages now and will blog about them once the world is ready to know about them at present all I can say is one is local and will affect Goa and the other two ones have a global impact.

Well what about the current company that I am working at since I did play a significant role in getting it on track (I would say I still have not yet made it reach all its goals and would have loved too continue to build it up but now I have a new challenge and would like to pursue that) so will continue to be on board till the new management takes over.

Till I am totally out of the present employers company I am operating 4 ventures which is beginning to take its toll on me. I am in a totally f****d up state right now. physically and mentally tired need a vacation to revitalize myself but no time to take one and also cant afford one financially with me investing all my money in myself and also trying to raise more capital from friends first and then will try to raise some from the market (raising capital in india is a headache and will write a separate post on that later).

the other fun thing I did today other then reading friends outstanding blog posts and commenting is did some good old fashion reading of a paperbook the book is Business Miscellany (it is a gem of a book and very informative) also went through the latest issue of business world and will read the latest issue of business today tomorrow as my copy is borrowed by a friend and will be getting it back tomorrow. Well normally also I do read a lot at nights I scour through around 28 sources of tech and biz news with all this information I consume in a day maybe that explains why I get only a few hours of sleep daily. But reading online and reading a physical book is totally different experience and I prefer a book to a computer screen anytime.

Once I finish with this I have more books which I have bought from pune during my pune trip and have not had time to go through them yet but now will make it a point to read atleast half an hour from one of the books daily.

Also the other things that I have been doing is putting together all the paperwork necessary for the new ventures and all I can say is it is boring and a total turn off to an entrepreneur it is a troublesome affair but I guess everyone has to go through it and makes the person wiser about the working of the govt departments and how to handle all the different officers whose sole purpose of holding govt jobs is not to do any work and occupy the chairs and get paid from the govt treasury.Well the paperwork is going on and hopefully will soon be complete.

It will be difficult to get the blog updated frequently now but whenever I get time will write a few words about my journey through life and the new ventures.

The other news is of Hilton Hotel Corp being acquired by the buyout firm Blackstone Group for a whooping 26 billion dollars wowie Paris Hilton is now even more rich after she got out jail (hahahaha) I wonder if her going to jail got Blackstone Group’s attention to make this deal (hahahaha)
anyway paris hilton has more pocket change now and maybe she can take a break from partying give her fortune to charity and join a nunnery somewhere who knows it might happen tomorrow and shock the world tomorrow
Hilton is a prestigious chain of hotels I remember Jay Leno of the Tonight Show saying that Paris should have been made to stay in one of the Hilton’s instead of a jail that would have been more torturing.
Well personally I have not stayed in a Hilton but been to one of them in a place called Fujairah in UAE nice little small property on the Shores of Fujairah facing the arabian sea. It forms a get away from the corp world for the big guns form the main commercial hub of UAE which is Dubai.

source for the above statements are source 1 and source 2