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Tag: #MarkZuckerberg

That Wild, Wild Web: NOT a Tale of Web 3.0

That Wild, Wild Web: NOT a Tale of Web 3.0

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Tech is and has been referred to as the wild, wild west since the early days of Web 1. Like those pioneers who ventures out into terra incognita when the west was being settled, those web pioneers didn’t know what they’d find, and even in their travels, they were making it up as they went along.

Head’s up: the same goes for investors. There’s no startup handbook, although there are books that bear that title. There’s no investor handbook, either. Which is why founders may hear one thing from one investor, get totally different feedback/advice from another. And yet different feedback/advice from a third, and so it may go, all the way down the line.

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Bye Bye, Mon Unicorn

Bye Bye, Mon Unicorn

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 With the downturn in the unicorn market, founders have lost much of their power with investors. “New unicorns are plummeting. Here’s how volatile markets and shrinking valuations are shifting power from founders to investors, CB Insights reported, and venture funding to startups is ebbing.

Even those certain funds and investors who had ridden to rock star status in the last decade plus with those outsized returns are being scrutinized more closely, especially by the tech press. While new funds are still being raised, existing funds raising follow on funds and investors are still writing checks – albeit more cautiously these days, Adam Newmann and A16z’s investment into Flow aside –  if it’s not full-on investor winter in many quarters, we’re certainly getting close.

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The Demise of Tech’s Boy Band Founders

The Demise of Tech’s Boy Band Founders

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Photo by Mubariz Mehdizadeh on Unsplash

We also like to call them the Boys of Summer – those unicorn tech super founders, that is.

As the New York Times noted, The Boy Bosses of Silicon Valley Are on Their Way Out, dismounting their unicorns and heading for the hills, with their largesse in tow and never mind the layoffs and loss of shareholder value that they’ve left in their wake.

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Has Zuck Run Out of Luck?

Has Zuck Run Out of Luck?

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Photo by Annie Spratt @unsplash

 Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook (now Meta) has always been something of a bellwether for the Web 2.0 Age of Surveillance nee Age of Social and high time to just call it as it is.

Since Zuckerberg did help to define the last iteration, it stands to reason that he would lead us once more into the fray as we barrel towards Web 3, no?

He thinks so. He may not be building his own metaverse as originally planned, but nor is he sitting idly by. Au contraire. Instead, as Futurism noted, “the company wants to get in on the ground floor and determine its rules.” Read More...

Meet the New Boss: The New Work Paradigm?

Meet the New Boss: The New Work Paradigm?

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Photo by Austin Chan of Unsplash

A lot has changed since the lockdowns and the Submit or Flight response that ensued, when the migration from the Draconian rules of the tech hubs – Silicon Valley and New York in particular – began.

 

Working conditions shift with each new industrial revolution and despite the fact that the Information/Internet Era has been somewhat established for close to 20 years, we haven’t really seen a change. Until now. Read More...

Is Facebook Imploding?

Is Facebook Imploding?

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Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Although you might believe that we meant to say ‘Meta,’ no, we meant Facebook, which is a division of Meta.

According to Techcrunch, Meta says its metaverse biz lost another $3B in Q1 – but the 2030s will be ‘exciting’ and damn the torpedoes. Make no mistake about it and according to Input, Mark Zuckerberg is hell-bent on the metaverse — and getting you to work in VR, pointing out that “The Facebook CEO…sees it as the “successor to the mobile internet”…The big question is if anyone will follow Zuckerberg into the metaverse.”

Certainly not Sheryl Sandberg. According to the Wall Street Journal, “One of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business she was instrumental in building. That dovetailed with a company investigation into her activities. Read More...

Same Schmidt, Different Day

Same Schmidt, Different Day

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It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the tech cabal,. You know that there’s always something to see. And something they’d prefer you’d not see.

One of the latest reports is that Apple and Meta Gave User Data to Hackers Who Used Forged Legal Requests. It seems the two behemoths “provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials,” Yahoo!finance reported, including “basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.””

It seems that rather than hacking Apple and Meta (nee Facebook) directly, given their armies of coders, instead, the hackers breached law enforcement agencies worldwide. For the record, the hackers who sell this information to various and nefarious, only charge $100-$250 for this service. In 2021, Meta received 21,000+ ‘emergency requests’ which do not need to be signed off by a judge, and complied with 77% of them, while Apple received over 1100 and complied with 93% of them. Read More...

Is Mark Zuckerberg About to Say ‘Zuck It’?

Is Mark Zuckerberg About to Say ‘Zuck It’?

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pic by giampieroruggieri @pixabay & we do recall when Zuck wore sandals with socks

Short and sweet due to President’s Day Weekend and speaking of the men in charge, think about this:

Jeff Bezos stepped back from the daily grind at Amazon (he’s still Executive Chairman and very much involved, trust us);

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin retreated from the spotlight at Alphabet/Google long ago. Read More...

Is the Long Arm of Silicon Valley Being Cut Off at the Knees?

Is the Long Arm of Silicon Valley Being Cut Off at the Knees?

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

f you’ve been following what’s been going on lately in tech and focusing on the headlines, you might have missed the forest through the trees.

Silicon Valley Disruption Part 1:

Facebook just lost half a million users, the headlines screamed (out of nearly 2B, and no bigs, you’d think, but a) they’re not growing, b) those users are in the US: prime market, which meant they took a big hit on their profits and c) it’s the first time ever that FB lost users), and the stock was devalued 20%, wiping  $200BN off the value of parent-firm Meta. Of course, founder  Mark Zuckerberg was quick to come up with the excuses, par usual (ever notice that it’s never his bad?): Read More...

And the Winner for Worst Company of 2021 Is…

And the Winner for Worst Company of 2021 Is…

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According to an audience survey conducted by Yahoo Finance, Facebook/Meta takes the prize, hands down, with 50% more votes than its competitor, Alibaba. According to the article, “its stock price is up 22% year-to-date — strong, but lagging the S&P 500— but down around 13% from its September high.”

So how does one achieve such a dubious honor? Well, there’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, whose list of missteps are just too long to enumerate, considering that many of you no doubt still have holiday shopping to get done and this wouldn’t necessarily be the holiday list worth getting into – again – despite the fact that it is that time of the year.

Then there were “The Facebook Files, a series of investigative reports published by the Wall Street Journal and based on leaks provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Much of the publicity around the leaks focused on the impact of Instagram (a subsidiary of Meta Platforms) on teenage girls, and the company’s alleged indifference… Haugen also alleged that Facebook’s potential for radicalization has contributed to genocides in Myanmar and Ethiopia, among a myriad of other concerns expressed in the reports,” as ZeroHedge reminded us. Read More...