(Read the transcription below)
Transcription
Happy Birthday, Facebook. The Story of a 10 Year Old Start-Up
Today is the birthday of Facebook. Ten years old. A very young company and a lot of things happened during these last ten years. It’s a company that has a value of more than 150 billion dollars.
When Facebook was created it was basically a web based company. However, one of the main problems of Facebook was how to transition to the mobile cousin. And today, Facebook is able basically to have a very profitable business model in the mobile business world, having more than 900 mobile active users daily.
If we need to mention the different drivers that have been shaping the technology industry in the last 10 years, social is one of the components, together with mobility and cloud. And altogether basically they’re generating a huge quantity of information, that is what it’s called “Big data”.
A new way to interact and to interconnect people through a social network is not only now a utility that is useful for youngsters in a dorm environment, it is also useful for companies, how to interact with companies, how to interact with clients, how to interact with brands and to have basically an instant temperature of how the market is reacting to some launches or some products or services.
I think it is very interesting and significant that the key note speaker of the next Mobile Congress in Barcelona is going to be Mark Zuckenberg, from Facebook. Facebook now has a new project, that is internet.org and the main reason is to connect the next billion people to internet.
Right now Facebook has one billion people, but there are two thirds still of the world that are not connected to Internet. Together with the TELCOs, Facebook is working in order to have access to Internet, basically through Facebook services through different types of phones. Not only smartphones, but also feature phones, in developed countries, in Africa and in Latin America.
The future is very uncertain, but the important thing from Facebook is that they’re experimenting every day with the business model. We need to understand that, at the beginning, this company was not making any kind of revenues, but is adapting and using this lean start-up approach, and is trying to find the new revenues. Now Facebook is getting more than 50% of the revenues coming from mobile, something that wasn’t thinkable maybe two years ago, and something that also is reflected in the valuation of the company, with the stock, that is almost double of the initial IPO.
