Yes Billy, today was a piece of news we have been anticipating, and the market liked it...serious reading so I stuck to the first couple of pages. The NASDAQ closing 0.8% up yesterday helped significantly.
MKB Price at posting:
15.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
Hi All Found this on marketwatch , "interesting read" I only post half the report , u can read the rest at marketwatch. I like the bit about Zuckerburg[FB] and teen generated start-ups. Possabilitys??
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Two Internet startups last week received new rounds of venture funding that valued each company at well over $1 billion. Uber, the developer of a smartphone app and ride-sharing service, is reportedly in talks for additional rounds of venture capital funding that will value the company at $10 billion. The San Francisco-based startup connects drivers and passengers in over 100 cities around the world. Uber confirmed in December that it was generating revenue of over $20 million a week, amounting to an annualized $1 billion. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Pinterest, a scrap-booking startup, said it raised an additional $200 million in venture capital at a valuation of $5 billion. The company, which also is based in San Francisco, only recently began to book any sales. Pinterest’s “promoted pins” enables companies to “pin” visual content, an example of which is a big photo of a layered bean salad with an attached recipe by Kraft with a small logo. Such multibillion-dollar values for tiny companies is renewing talk of another Internet bubble in Silicon Valley. What blasted values further into the stratosphere was Facebook Inc.’s /quotes/zigman/9962609/delayed/quotes/nls/fbFB-0.26% $19 billion February offer in cash, stock and restricted stock for WhatsApp, a global text-messaging company that circumvents telephone networks. Click to Play How to spot online liars “$10 billion is the new $1 billion,” said Sam Hamadeh, CEO and founder of PrivCo, which analyzes private companies. “Instagram would be easily valued at $5 billion in the current market.” Last month, home-sharing startup Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in a new venture round and cloud-storage company Dropbox received the same valuation in a financing round in January. Investors might remember that Facebook bought the photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion a month before it went public in 2012. At the time, Instagram had no revenue, much like another recent Facebook deal, Oculus VR. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is keen to find companies and technology on the cutting edge or popular with teens and younger users to keep the world’s largest social network with over 1.2 billion users from stagnating. So it is the large publicly traded companies with hefty war chests that are fueling the feeding frenzy and skyrocketing valuations. “The tech companies do it because there is a fear factor,” Hamadeh said. “They fear the winds will shift and they will become MySpace, or they will become Palm. They are so afraid of being left behind. That is why Facebook bought Instagram within a week of negotiations. Because Zuckerberg saw in Facebook’s stats that Instagram was coming out of nowhere. Same thing with WhatsApp.” Twitter Inc. /quotes/zigman/23556538/delayed/quotes/nls/twtrTWTR-0.28% is getting nervous about its slower-than-expected user growth, with Wall Street demanding more. On Monday, Re/code reported that Twitter is looking at buying SoundCloud, a Berlin-based startup that lets consumers share audio and music files. A deal with SoundCloud would help Twitter expand the reach of its core service and add new users to its 250 million active user base. Many are still pondering why Apple Inc. (TICKER:AAPL) may be interested in acquiring
MKB Price at posting:
15.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
