Investor Warns of "Trouble" for Startups, Possibly Not a Bubble Burst

A disagreement of at least modest proportions about whether we are in yet another Internet bubble has popped up now and again over the last couple of years. Facebook's initial public offering and the valuations of social software firms with zero revenues are contributing to the questions. 


Paul Graham, cofounder of Silicon Valley's most important startup incubator, Y Combinator, has sent an email to portfolio companies warning them "bad times" may be ahead, according to Business Insider.


"The bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups," he says. To be sure, that does not mean we have been in a bubble, only that Graham thinks valuations are overdone.


The problem is that "no one knows yet how much" valuations are too high. "Possibly only a little," he says. But  also "possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle." 


That "everyone" does not agree, and given that valuations have not yet demonstrably collapsed, across the board, means we still can't say whether the recent Internet investment climate is a bubble or not. One never knows until afterwards. 


That we still aren't sure means any potential bubble has not yet burst. The other issue is whether the effects of any possible bubble can be confined only to the software and application business, or whether the impact will be economy wide. As destructive as the popping of the Internet bubble was in 2001, it did not have equally destructive force outside of telecom and Internet circles. 


Excess liquidity, which most observers would say characterizes the global economy, generally is part of the problem. Investors cannot find attractive places to invest startup capital, so lots of companies that shouldn't be funded, get funded. 


Remember the Internet bubble? In retrospect, there was a reason competitive local exchange carrier startup executives virtually universally were told to get big, fast, leading to what you might call over-funding of the firms that got backing. 


The reason firms that might have succeeded with their original, smaller business plans were "forced" to come up with bigger plans had nothing to do with the opportunity as such. The problem was mechanical. 


Investment firms were awash with cash, and had to deploy it. Faced with a relative dearth of "good" places to put all that cash, they preferred to place a smaller number of bigger bets, rather than many small bets, because that was a better way to deploy available investment funds.


"Use it or lose it," in other words, became a reason for firms to make funding decisions that ultimately destroyed what many estimate was a trillion dollars worth of investment. For surviving telecom firms, you can see what happened to valuations.

Google Bought Meebo For Advertising Potential

Meebo found a way to actually monetize monetize chat, which is why Google is buying Meebo. Meebo introduced a bar that any publisher or business owner could integrate into the experience of their site, without mucking up the chat experience.


That suggests other chat or messaging applications might someday find a way to create ad revenue in the context of the experience as well, which would create revenue out of app experiences that have been tough to monetize. 

Twitter Really Does Break News

Twitter isn't a very good "search engine," many would argue, but there are reasons for that.Twitter really is becoming a place where real-time news breaks. But that also means a high degree of content churn. 


The most frequent terms in one hour might look very different from those in the next hour, . Twitter says. 


Examining all search queries from October 2011, Twitter found that, on average, about 17 percent of the top 1,000 query terms from one hour are no longer in the top 1,000 during the next hour. 


In other words, 17 percent of the top 1000 query terms "churn over" on an hourly basis, Twitter says.


Repeating this at a granularity of days instead of hours, Twitter finds that about 13 percent of the top 1,000 query terms from one day are no longer in the top 1000 during the next day.


But during major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically. For example, on October 5, 2011, immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query "steve jobs" spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15 percent of the query stream.

Enterprise Videoconferencing and Telepresence Market Growth Decelerates

There was  a noticeable deceleration in enterprise telepresence and videoconferencing market growth in the first quarter of 2012, with videoconferencing revenue growing 14.4 percent year over year, well below the 23 percent to 25 percent year-over-year growth range witnessed in the prior three consecutive quarters. 


Compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, the enterprise videoconferencing market declined 21 percent. 


The single-codec telepresence market grew 28.5 percent, while the personal videoconferencing segment grew 52.6 percent, year over year.


The multi-codec immersive telepresence market declined 38.7 percent, IDC says. 


The first quarter of 2012 was the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines for the immersive telepresence segment, IDC says. 

Tablets Will be Added to Enterprise "Standard" Devices, IDC Predicts

There was a time when PCs were not a staple of enterprise worker "standard issue" productivity gear. Neither were notebook PCs or smart phones. All those products now are staples. And tablets will be next.


A high percent of respondents surveyed by IDC reported they expect tablets will be a second device to the typical  worker's laptop or desktop. 


The notion that tablets would be treated as second devices to laptops and refreshed every 2.5 years will be costly for IT organizations in the long run, IDC says.


IDC estimates it will cost the average large organization an additional one percent of their IT budget every year just to refresh the tablets alone, IDC says. 

U.S. Text Messaging Declines Slightly in April 2012

In April 2012, 74.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device. But that was a decline from the 74.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers who used text messaging in January 2012.


That will bear watching, to see whether the European substitution trend, where users are using over the top messaging in place of text messaging, also is growing in the U.S. market. At the very least, it appears text messaging use has flattened out.  


Downloaded applications were used by 50.2 percent of subscribers (up 1.6 percentage points), while browsers were used by 49.0 percent (up 0.5 percentage points).


Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 0.3 percentage points to 36.0 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 33.1 percent of the mobile audience (up 1.3 percentage points), while 25.8 percent listened to music on their phones (up 1.3 percentage points), according to comScore. 

Eventually, Service Providers Will Price by Value

There are some very-practical implications to the notion that telecommunications now is a multi-product business.

Profit margins (net income divided by revenue), varies widely by industry. Grocery stores have margins in the six-percent range, while banks have margins as thin as two percent to three percent.

Many would note that profit margins for text messaging are quite high, in fact, almost arbitrarily high. One reason is that text messaging is a feature made possible by the out of band signaling digital voice services require. In other words, short message service actually is possible because it is part of the other signaling activities the voice network has to support, anyway.

That means it is mostly an accounting exercise to determine what text messaging profit margin actually is.

One issue is that it matters how people pay for use of text messaging. Many have flat fee plans for an unlimited number of messages, so profit margin arguably could depend on the number of messages sent, though messaging cost is relatively insensitive to volume.

You might argue that a user on a per-message plan, paying 20 cents to send a message up to 160 characters in length, is paying, for the use of bandwidth, at about 100,000 times more than the per-byte rate of a typical consumer access plan, by some estimates.

That isn’t really the point, though. Few products are absolute commodities, and few products are priced strictly according to cost of production. In fact, one characteristic of highly-branded luxury products is that retail pricing is set more on intangible factors (demand) than the cost of production.

Also, any multi-product retailer typically sells products with varying profit margins. That increasingly is true for communications service providers as well.

By some estimates, though gross profit margins averaged 86.51 percent for the telecommunications industry in 2010, net margin was only about 10.99 percent, on average.

Assuming industry-average expenses, a reasonable profit margin would be anything between 10 and 15 percent.

Of course, little in the telecom business is “average.” Without various subsidies, small rural telcos would consistently lose money, overall.

Also, profit margins vary dramatically by product. Text messaging margins are almost arbitrary, and can in principle feature margins of 80 percent, though margin is dropping.

As communications now is a multi-product business, including mobile voice, texting, mobile broadband, machine-to-machine services, fixed network broadband, voice, video entertainment and business services, with important new lines of business being built in other areas, executives and managers must contend with many lines of business, each with a different gross revenue contribution and profit margin margin.

In part, communications service providers actually do sell “raw bandwidth,” in the case of consumer high-speed access, where government regulations do not permit any packet prioritization or other quality of service measures.

But service providers also sell applications and features. Assuming it eventually recognized that consumer welfare, service provider health and investment require revenue that is matched to cost and value, we should see the development of retail pricing that sometimes is paid by the end user, sometimes is paid by a third party advertiser or app provider, or sometimes is paid by a combination of advertising, end user fees and third party payments.