Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist
Really enjoyed it. Feels so real because everything makes sense.
You could even checkout on Google Maps where all that stuff is happening.
No wonder they are going to make a Movie out of it.
Great video to understand the logic of Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
What Facebook buying OculusVR is all about
Now Facebook acquired OculusVR for 2 billion dollars, this comes as a surprise but has a clear rationale behind it.
To understand this you simply have to follow the money.
Right now Facebook is extremely overvalued, and Facebook knows that the best.
They have a P/E ratio of 98.90 and growth is difficult for them. They are not a marketplace like Google, they rely on their own advertising inventory.
So now how do you leverage that? When the shares are out, you can’t influence the course much. If Facebook simply sells shares the price would automatically drop and people get suspicious what leads to a further decrease in valuation.
One great way to do that is making acquisitions with shares. Facebook can extend it’s influence by owning new companies and because you sell ‘non-voting’ stocks you (in this case Mark Zuckerberg) don’t even give up control.
That was probably the rationale behind WhatsApp, what was a defensive move by Facebook, but smart considering the overvalued stock.
Two questions are open, who gets the money and who where does it come from?
The shareholders of Facebook, they own right now some percentage of the classic profitable business of Facebook and the future revenue, that’s why they assume that P/E is reasonable. But now the former owners of the acquired company own also a part of it and the percentage you own of Facebook decreases.
In a more conservative business if you would buy a public company, you could easily calculate the appropriate share price adjustment.
But why not in the case of Facebook? Well it’s all technology, nobody knows how much WhatsApp or OculusVR is really worth. It’s just speculation, but the shareholders can’t do anything about it because they don’t have voting shares (that’s the “price” you pay for them).
Now to the ones that benefit, when you look at OculusVR and WhatsApp you see the big and well connected VC names. You look for a company with a lot of buzz where the total value is very speculative and then you call up your former business partner who has an overvalued company. Mark Zuckerberg had surprisingly good investment terms back then….
Regarding OculusVR:
If a company that is in a so different space really wants to bet on the future of VR (Could you really imagine the average Facebook userbase with the OculusRift??), they could have made a strategic investment. In that case the shares of the VC’s would get diluted and they all sit in one boat if the company fails.
In respect of the VC’s, this is probably 50/50 about cashing out and getting cold feet about Sony announcing their VR system.
Also the situation Facebook has is rare and can be over any time.
I also wouldn’t feel sorry for the shareholders, the information is right there and they can get out any time.
History and Hard Science Fiction
I got somehow totally addicted to history, I really had problems lately what to consume for leisure.
I am hard science fiction fan, but there is the new dilemma that reality takes over fiction. Maybe that was already my desire for something that is as realistic as possible.
The best stuff I’ve read so far is stuff from Charles Stross (Read Acclerando!), but it degrades for the stated reason over time. Maybe that’s also a good thing, so there is always a chance for some new cool book coming out.
What got me hooked was that podcast: Hardcore History - Thor’s Angels
It’s the history of Europe for hours, from the fall of the Roman empire to the first Roman Emperor after ages Charlemagne. I realized that the whole western world never got over the fallen Empire until the Cold War started when there was suddenly a global playing field.
Now I travel a lot and every time I read a lot about the history of the country and the region. I am in Israel at the moment and here an even longer history effects the situation today. I also realized how massive the colonial era influenced basically everything. So everything connects, it’s like this gigantic playing field that interconnects.
The material is basically endless here.
So while I figure out occasionally the next cool hard science fiction stuff I can indulge in History.
Starting a new blog
This is like the 10. time when I wrote a post on a new blog announcing the new blog. None of them exist any more and most of them just had the announcing blog.
I want to write about personal stuff, I deleted a lot of posts that were semt technical and made another one just for technology stuff. it’s dev.sekistner.com that is build with ghost.io. Tumblr is way better for short stuff like this.
Right now I am in a cheap hostel in Tel Aviv, surprisingly I have wlan on my room but I don’t know from whom. I don’t worry that my Laptop is being hacked by somebody who has an unsecured wifi.