Flavio about Business 2.0

This afternoon (morning in New York) Google’s stock hit the symbolic value of 600$ a share. It opened for $85 in 2004 and has thus created a 7x return on investment for its earliest public investors. The market capitalization of Google - 186.53 bn $ - is slowly but steadily approaching Microsoft’s 279.70 bn $ valuation.

Contrary to the currently much hyped social networks and as much hyped facebook applications, Google generates real money: 1,104.62 bn $ of operating income in the last quarter alone. On top of that they have 10′000 of engineers researching and building new products. And what Google does right: they hire the smartest people they can find and go great lengths to find and keep them (ever heard of free massage, free hair dresser, 24/7 access to the office or free gourmet dining at your workplace?) . Take a look for example at the following Google recruitement video.

In an intriguing blog post, seobook’s Aaron Wall describes how Google could leverage the huge amount of information it’s gathering every day to make predictions on stock markets .

It’s very true that Google has access to almost everything that’s happening on the web. How about a (paying?) service that tracks specific patterns in Google searches and Blog Posting and an analysis of Google Finance usage to create an instant trend recognizer?

This VC thinks that Facebook is worth 100bn $. He’s running a facebook only VC Fund. He says the valuation of 100 bn $ is realistic if we have 200 mio users in 18 months (time of the IPO?) valued at 500 $ per user. Compared to the approx 100$ valuation of a Studivz User, that doesn’t even seem that unrealistic to me.

Very quickly, facebook could be worth as much as our friends at google: 160bn, at the time of this post. Not to mention yahoo, with a measly 30bn $ valuation. Maybe they should’ve bid a bit more when Facebook said no to 1bn $…

Enjoy the movie with courtesy of Facereview

See also:

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? Yeah, and here’s why: (highly recommended)

As reported today in Cash Daily, people who know nothing about Stock Markets and the companies they’re investing in, on average make better money than those who have at least access to some amount of information.

The explanation is simple: People who have certain, but not all and not the newest information, make poor decisions on outdated informations, which market players with the most extensive information have acted upon long ago.

Only if you have access to a huge amount of information and the necessary tools to work with them, you can make a really informed buying decision.

Otherwise, the study suggests, you’d rather roll a dice to pick the stocks you’re investing in, than trying to do research.

Hard facts, and everybody will think “Yeah, that might be true to others, but I certainly know what I’m doing”. Who would want to admit that he made money on the stock market by rolling dices?

While intensively following Google Stock Price today, I noticed how we where approaching the all time high of GOOG.

At the end of the day, the stock has effectively clearly surpassed it’s previous all time high of $513 to to close at $518.84 and to rise even more in after hours trading, up to $520.15, making the total gain 2.57% today.

The rise certainly is connected with the announced Salesforce.com deal, which will enable salesforce.com customers to link their marketing campaigns directly with google adwords and thus help Google acquire new clients in a very inexpensive way.

What’s next with the Google stock?

The Google stock has been underperforming compared to other tech stocks like apple and might just now become increasingly interesting to investors. Time has yet to tell if the high volume acquisition of DoubleClick will yield the expected synergies and new sales for Google and/or Doubleclick products.