Posted: April 7th, 2011 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | Tags: datacenter, Facebook, open | No Comments »
Facebook opened up its datacenter plans! It’s a really big contribution, and it is sure to change the way that Data Centers are designed. It could also prove to be disruptive for hardware manufacturers in the server space. Gigaom covers a lot of the details.
The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.
Some of the design details seem obvious to me. Unless you are standing in front of a server, the speaker is useless. Also, the beeps can be muffled by the fans and the hundreds of other servers in the vicinity. A visual indicator of server health is far more useful.
This reminds me of the time one of the marketing managers at Novell referred to the telecom closet in a branch office as a datacenter. Even IT geeks sometimes forget the scale at which some large corporations are running at. Minute energy savings, such as the ones found by Facebook, are a nerdy (but green) topic.
Posted: November 30th, 2010 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | Tags: castles built in the sky, derivatives, Facebook, valuation | No Comments »
FastCompany posted this interesting article about Facebook valuation.
Venture Capitalists and others value non-public companies by the amount of the last investment or trade. In Facebook’s case, the last trade was rumored to value the entire company at 35 to 50 billion dollars. An example, if 10% of the company gets sold for 10 cents, then the entire company must be worth 1 dollar. In this case, people are willing to pay exorbitant amounts for shares of Facebook. Since there is such a restricted supply of these shares, and the demand is so great, the result is a stratospheric valuation of the entire company. There is a fascinating story over at Bloomberg on how trading in Facebook derivatives has taken off.
Current Facebook shareholders gain the most out of this scheme. However, it is sort of like a pyramid scheme – at some point they will run out of investors willing to pay such high premiums. If the stock ever does go public, and it will because of SEC regulations, the valuation should adjust downwards to reflect the intrinsic value.
Posted: May 21st, 2010 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: technology | Tags: Facebook, identity, People Magazine | 1 Comment »
This image, from People Magazine, is why I am scared of Facebook.
On one hand, I am really excited that they found a way for me to post my thoughts without having to log into their site. On the other hand, they have my picture, my name, and know that I’m interested Lindsay Lohan’s accidental nudity. On top of that, it allows Facebook to better target their ads based on my browsing preferences.
Also, I thought I had turned this functionality off?
