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?

It’s been not even two months since I blogged about facebook Switzerland having 20k users. As of now, facebook Switzerland has 42k users. So we doubled in just about 8 weeks. If we continue at this growth rate, Switzerland’s whole population will be on facebook in just eight months.

Other growing networks are:

France: 150k users (tripled within those 8 weeks)

Germany: 100k users (also doubled)

Italy: 53k users (more than doubled)

Spain: 57k users (more than doubled)

You see, everyone is reporting almost insane growth in Europe. This could help legitimate the rumor of facebooks current 10 bn $ valuation.

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)