Overvaluing Social Media?

Interesting article about the number of inactive user accounts currently on Twitter.  Of the 941 million Twitter accounts in existence, almost half (44%) have never even sent a tweet.  This seems like a problem for a company with a market cap of 23.6 billion, but a reported  net loss last year of $511 million.  The biggest struggle for these social media companies is finding a way to successfully monetize their user bases.  Ad revenue is the obvious answer, but it likely presents a challenge for a company like Twitter to lure in new advertisers who might be wary whether their ads are actually reaching real people, as opposed to fake or computer generated twitter accounts.  I wonder to what extent the problem of user inactivity at Twitter is evident of a problem in the social media industry as a whole.  If social media companies cannot find ways to generate more revenue, the massive valuations that many of these companies have received (Whatsapp, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram etc.) may begin to look more and more like a bubble ready to burst.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/11/new-data-quantifies-dearth-of-tweeters-on-twitter/?mod=trending_now_1

Harvard Takes a Step Toward Social Responsibility

http://www.pionline.com/article/20140408/ONLINE/140409885/harvard-adopts-un-backed-esg-investment-practices

Saw this article the other day about Harvard University and their endowment manager’s (Harvard Management Co.) decision to join the global group known as Principles for Responsible Investment. This decision seems to be a pinnacle choice going forward in terms of the precedent it may set for university endowments to partake in socially and environmentally responsible initiatives. What I found interesting about what this article did not say is that last year, students petitioned to have HMC divest itself of some of its energy holdings as a means of being more “responsible.” Whether this decision to join PRI was a direct result of that student action may never be known, but it certainly raises an interesting issue going forward in terms of how universities choose to invest.

San Francisco v. AirBnB

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-cracks-down-on-Airbnb-rentals-5381237.php#photo-6130485

San Francisco is beginning to evict renters that are using Airbnb to rent out spots on their sofas. There is an ordinance that clearly distinguishes apartments from hotels. Because Airbnb allows strangers to rent space in apartments, it turns apartments into pseudo-hotels. This is the perfect example of bureaucracy getting in the way of entrepreneurial ventures. People use this site for supplemental income to offset the absurdly high rent prices in San Francisco. It will be interesting to see how other cities react to this and if this will affect other websites such as couch surfing.

Considerations in Issuing Patents

Although dated, this article elucidates the legal landscape at the time this week’s cases were coming out.  It sheds light on both the case law and legislation, and considers the country’s reception and possible effects.  Some of the article also brings to mind our previous discussions of disruptive innovations.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EEDC153BF930A25752C0A96E9C8B63

And this article provides an interesting and entertaining take on the patent world.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/10/patent-smucker-newton-ent-tech-cx_mf_0310smallbizoutlookpatent.html

 

High taxes act like Prohibition

Crumpled Camel package

Interesting article about cigarette smuggling in Michigan. This started in the late 1990s, when the Michigan legislature decided to pass the second highest cigarette tax in the nation. (New York had the highest cigarette taxes at the time.)  Within months, people were starting to buy cigarettes in Toledo and other places across the border in Ohio and Indiana.  Party stores, gas stations and other Michigan vendors – particularly those close to the borders of other states – began complaining that they were losing revenues to stores in the other states. Whereupon the Michigan legislature passed yet another law, making it illegal to purchase more than X/cartons in other states. And then the smuggling started.

How can you enforce laws like that? You really can’t without random stops. And so that’s what the Michigan State Police started doing – randomly stopping vehicles crossing the Ohio and Indiana state lines into Michigan, and checking for what is now “contraband.”

http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/19725