good slide show
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Top 10 Signs Tech Is A Massive Bubble Again
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/kedrosky-tech-bubble-2011-3#ixzz1TLIeQi39
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/kedrosky-tech-bubble-2011-3#ixzz1TLIeQi39
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Anti- Bubble
Thiel: Tech Bubble? What Tech Bubble?
“The first component of a bubble — something a lot of people believe and can act on — doesn’t even exist,” Mr. Thiel said. “Most of these companies are privately held. There is no way for the public to become involved.”
The doomsayers are simply hungover from the last bubble’s burst, he said. “People are still burned out from the ’90s.”
Much of the bubble talk surrounds five companies: Groupon, LinkedIn, Zynga, Facebook and Twitter. Mr. Thiel estimates that those five companies account for three-quarters of the value of new Web companies and, he said, five companies do not make a bubble. If they did, we have bigger problems, he said.
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This Tech Bubble Is Different
This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher—one of Facebook's first 100 employees—the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others. The company also wanted to track differences in behavior between high-school-age kids and older, drunker college students. "I was there to answer these high-level questions, and they really didn't have any tools to do that yet," he says.
asr: Zuck doing smart job , with 100 th employee
"We are certainly in another bubble," says Matthew Cowan, co-founder of the tech investment firm Bridgescale Partners. "And it's being driven by social media and consumer-oriented applications."
The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.
"Any generation of smart people will be drawn to where the money is, and right now it's the ad generation," says Steve Perlman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once sold WebTV to Microsoft for $425 million and is now running OnLive, an online video game service. "There is a goodness to it in that people are building on the underpinnings laid by other people."
The most coveted employee in Silicon Valley today is not a software engineer. It is a mathematician," says Kelman, the Redfin CEO. "The mathematicians are trying to tickle your fancy long enough to see one more ad."
"Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things," he says. "We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings."
And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? "My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. "An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn't fundamentally increase American competitiveness."
"It's a safe bet that sometime in the next 20 months, the capital markets will close, the music will stop, and the world will look bleak again," says Bridgescale Partners' Cowan. "The legitimate concern here is that we are not diversifying, so that we have roots to fall back on when we enter a different part of the cycle."
