It was known for months that your iPhone tracks your location.

It was known for months that your iPhone tracks your location.

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It was known for months that your iPhone tracks your location.

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/BE64iUBWa9M/it-was-known-for-months-that-your-iphone-tracks-your-location-2011-4

Nokia Execs Go Missing For Two Months Every Year (NOK, AAPL)

Every year, Apple starts selling an updateded iPhone in July.

You'd imagine executives at the world's biggest cellphone company, Nokia, would be working their butts off during that month, dealing with an annual seismic shift in their space.

You would imagine incorrectly.

According to Adam Greenfield, a design consultant who spent two years with Nokia, July is the month executives at the company always check out – until September.

“In mid-July, Nokia House is a ghost town,” Greenfield tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

“If you need a decision and the key person’s at the summer cottage? Forget it. You’ll resolve that issue in September. It’s something that hampers their agility.”

No kidding. According to the same Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, Apple gets 3X more revenue per employee as Nokia and HTC gets 2X.

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See Also:

• Amazon Blasts Into Music Streaming Market With Cloud Drive
• iPhone 5 Might Not Launch Until Later This Year... Or 2012?
• Apple "Will Unveil The Future Of iOS" At WWDC June 6-10

Nokia Execs Go Missing For Two Months Every Year (NOK, AAPL)

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/MF5r5DESO8Q/nokia-execs-go-missing-for-two-months-every-year-2011-3

Facebook Shares Are Up 77% In Three Months – Here's Why

Facebook shares are going for $23 a pop in a 100,000 share auction at SharesPost this Thursday. A private investor tells Forbes that's 77% higher than he paid only three months ago.

Facebook's implied valuation on SharesPost is $43 billion.

SharesPost isn't the only company cashing-in on Facebook-mania.

A couple weeks ago we wrote about a new cottage industry of companies formed solely for the purpose of holding Facebook stock and then selling stock in those derivative companies.

Why is Facebook hype so strong right now?

Some ideas:

• Tremendous user-adoption. The site now has well over 500 million uniques.
• Revenue traction. Last spring, we heard Facebook revenues could cross $2 billion this year. Who knows where the projections are now.
• Some very successful industries are being built on top of Facebook – group-buying and social gaming – and Facebook is collecting "taxes" on those industries. In social gaming, Facebook collects 30% PLUS marketing expenses.
• Facebook keeps hosting press conferences for product rollouts and press keep attending them.

Some reason hype shouldn't be so strong?

• We have no real idea if Facebook revenues are actually near $2 billion. The company is private and doesn't have to report numbers to anyone.
• Groupon and its clones buy lots of Facebook ads, and we don't know if group-buying is a sustainable advertising model. Some local merchants say it kills their margins.
• Zynga and the other social game companies are desperate to find a way to live off Facebook. Google is supposedly building an alternative.

Meet the (soon-to-be) Facebook billionaires >>

Follow Nicholas Carlson on Twitter >>

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See Also:

• OMG: No One Is Freaking Out About The New Facebook Design!
• What Did Zuckerberg Accomplish With That Bush Meeting?
• 5 Bold Mobile Predictions For 2011

Facebook Shares Are Up 77% In Three Months – Here's Why

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/IHYKXPNv0Kg/facebook-shares-are-up-77-in-three-months-heres-why-2010-12

Twitter Adds Over 30 Million Users in the past Two Months

Twitter seems to have exploded, in the last few months; Twitter has added over 30 million users in the past two months.