maramine blog

Facebook is now a public company. Shares opened this morning at $42.05 and closed the day at $38.23, having been prevented by underwriters from dipping any lower. At the closing bell, Facebook’s market capitalization sat just north of $105 billion.

And the company has you to thank.

How does Facebook earn money? By using your personal data to build a targeted advertising platform it bills to advertisers as the best in the business. That model helped it raise more than $16 billion on Friday, making its offering the largest Internet IPO in history.

The title of biggest-ever Internet IPO was previously held by Google, which raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. How does Google earn money? By using your personal data to build a targeted advertising platform it bills to advertisers as the best in the business.

Noticing a trend?

The digital currency of this era is us. Human bitcoins.

Companies like Facebook and Google collect your personal data, as much of it as they possibly can, and they use it to serve you targeted ads. Those ads are paid for by companies sold on the idea that Facebook and Google have so much information about you—information you yourself gave them, both knowingly and unknowingly—that they know what kind of products you might buy and what services you might be interested in. Or, as far as Facebook and Google are concerned, what kind of ads you might click on.

And the human bitcoins become dollars in their pockets.

All of the data you store, all of the messages you send and receive, all of the photos you share, all of the status updates you post, all of the webpages you “like,” all of the things you “+1,” all of the locations you check into and all of the pages you’re a “fan” of help Facebook and Google convince advertisers that they can target your eyeballs and wallets better than any other company.

Google and Facebook are the best in the business when it comes to collecting your data, and this is what investors are really buying into.

Looking for the next monster IPO? Find companies developing newer, better ways to collect and analyze your data, and you’ll find companies that understand the digital currency of this era.

“The mind of a child is the great­est gift we will ever receive. As embryos in our moth­ers’ womb, our heart, the first organ to develop only to power the next organ – the devel­op­ing brain which is soon mak­ing a quar­ter of a mil­lion new neu­rons every minute. In the first 10 years of life, our infant brain will have made bil­lions and bil­lions of con­nec­tions. It is an super­charged engine for learn­ing and cre­ativ­ity. Yet by adult­hood we have lost most of this cre­ativ­ity. We now think like adults. That is we think too much and our thoughts are too influ­enced by our knowl­edge. We need to get back our abil­ity to think like kids again. How?”

Source: Principia Arbiter

“[Dali’s] favorite technique is that he would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate. He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep. The moment that he began to doze the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images.”

Source: Psychology Today

Know what Apple should do with the even more massive pile of cash* it’s sitting on? Build its products in America.

*$96.7 billion last quarter

Know what Apple should do with the massive pile of cash* it’s sitting on? Build its products in America.

*$81.57 billion last quarter