Facebook Shares Slide M...

Facebook shares dropped more than 13 percent to $33.14 — below the company’s final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley. Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled . The company’s market cap is now around $90.1 billion, down from the $104 billion valuation the company opened with last week. That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year. Over the weekend, there was a raging debate about whether the banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch ) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line. Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent. These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more. That’s a sentiment that was echoed by Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Fred Wilson this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. He said, “The price of Facebook isn’t that important. Mark built an incredible organization. I don’t care whether it’s trading at $25 or 35.” Facebook’s performance is probably affecting tech stocks across the board. This morning, Zynga’s shares are off 7 percent to $6.65 and LinkedIn is down 6.4 percent to $92.65.

Personalization Is Not ...

Editor’s note: Scott Brave is the CTO and co-founder, Baynote . We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question – what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature. In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example. Personalization is not new. Popularized by Amazon and Netflix more than a decade ago, personalization is the practice of tailoring information to people based on what they are looking for, what they have found interesting in the past, what their friends have engaged with, or based on explicit inputs like their interests. Personalization has gotten a lot of positive attention recently because it can be used to great effect to organize the web’s information overflow into relevant, meaningful experiences. Winning companies approach personalization as a core value of how they do business – a “customer-centric” philosophy – rather than an add-on “feature.” As proof, here are some examples of companies that have built their businesses around personalization and the competition that they left in their wake. News: Flipboard vs. Yahoo! News In 2001, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! News , providing a repository for news articles that became the first-ever most-emailed page on the web. However, Yahoo! News neglected to treat personalization as a core value – and in so doing missed out on the opportunity to tap into the social graph of personal information to personalize and curate content for users based on their interests. With Yahoo! treating personalization as a feature and not a core value, by 2010, consumers moved on to new, more personalized content curation services that were specifically designed for consuming media. One example of such a personalized news source is Flipboard , which works across Apple devices, and allows users to “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from partner websites to find the news articles that are most interesting to them. Within a year of its founding, Flipboard had amassed a $200 million valuation. Today, the company’s valuation and user base continues to skyrocket, while Yahoo!’s continues to hemorrhage. Flipboard won because it applied personalization to consumer choice for news articles that other news providers hadn’t accounted for, sparking the beginning of the content curation boom. Interestingly, Yahoo! recently announced plans to eliminate many of its online properties in order to focus on its most popular ones and make the content on those sites personalized to the user. It seems Yahoo! has finally caught on to the fact that users like personalized content and will engage with brands and services that provide content tailored to their interests. Music: Pandora vs. Internet radio This example seems counter-intuitive – wouldn’t people want to listen to their favorite radio station online? This just never took off. Why? Internet radio contained way too much content – it wasn’t focused or specific enough. Consumers had to work too hard to find the music they liked. Once consumers were introduced to a better way to curate and listen to music, they were never going back. When Pandora allowed users to input their music preferences through both explicit selections and implicit actions to help shape their content stream, it changed the listening experience. Pandora made listening to music online personal. After Pandora, just listening to the radio online seemed like a waste of time. Dining: Alfred (Google) vs. Opentable OpenTable provides a free service that lets users make reservations online. The company first came on the scene in 1998, and has steadily built up its business – today over 25,000 restaurants are signed up with the service. While OpenTable provides restaurant recommendations along the side of the screen based on location, it is a feature rather than being core to the experience. Alfred, on the other hand, is a mobile app developed by Clever Sense (purchased by Google in December) that delivers dining recommendations based exclusively on your inputs and your Facebook check-ins and profile. By offering recommendations for restaurants that are personalized to consumer’s inputs and behavior Google could become a leading provider of time-critical dining data, and a big player in the multi-billion dollar restaurant industry. These examples have all shown how companies that embrace personalization as a core value, and not just a feature can win. In today’s consumer-driven society companies that don’t pay attention to what people want most at any given moment risk losing significant market share to competitors that have built a culture around delighting customers with a highly personalized experience at every turn.

Real Tech Alert: Elon M...

Watch live streaming video from spaceflightnow at livestream.com SpaceX , the private space exploration company founded by PalPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk , is ready to boldly go where no private company has legitimately attempted to go before: The International Space Station . (Live video of the rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida is embedded above.) In just a few hours at 1:55am Pacific Time (which is 4:55am Eastern time) Saturday morning, SpaceX will attempt to make the first ever privately-funded launch to head to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch will be made with its Falcon 9 rocket, which is set to deploy its Dragon capsule . As SpaceFlightNow has very clearly reported , this is a risky and unique proposition in many ways: “SpaceX aims to launch its privately-built Dragon capsule Saturday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, fly the craft to the International Space Station, and deftly approach the complex for astronauts to grab the free-flying satellite with a robot arm. It is the first time a private company has attempted such a feat.” Obviously it is a super ambitious and expensive endeavor, but the SpaceX company is very keen to remind people that this is still an experiment. After all, this is the first time that a non-government US entity has made a move to land on the International Space Station . As SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told SpaceFlight Now: “We know this has been touted as a huge mission. We keep trying to say it’s a test. Nonetheless, it’s a big job.” The company has repeatedly emphasized to the press that this is “just a test flight.” Indeed, it is possible that we could watch the Falcon 9 go down in flames. But of course, the smart people at SpaceX have clearly taken great care to make sure that is not the case here on Saturday’s launch. In any case, we’ll have to wait and see to be sure — and the high stakes are a part of the excitement of it all. In a slightly larger lens, there is the hope that some of the newly-minted Facebook affiliated folks who acquired millions on Friday will opt to invest in projects that are nearly as interesting as Elon Musk’s endeavors. One can dream, at least.

David Kirkpatrick On Wh...

While Mark Zuckerberg rang in Facebook’s first day as a publicly traded company back in Silicon Valley , TechCrunch TV was in New York City to report on the scene from the NASDAQ stock market’s Marketsite building in Times Square. The opening bell and initial trades were a bit anti-climactic in person, as we’ve written — NASDAQ is a digital exchange after all, so there’s not too much to see visually. But it was a great opportunity to check out the NASDAQ “floor” in person, and talk all things Facebook with David Kirkpatrick , the NYC-based founder of Techonomy , Fortune Magazine alum, and best-selling author of the book “The Facebook Effect — The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World.” You can watch our whole chat with Kirkpatrick at the NASDAQ Marketsite in the video embedded above, which I’d recommend because he gives a pretty compelling interview. Below I’ve included a few of his insights, just to whet your appetite (and perhaps inspire you to endure all 30 seconds of that pre-roll video ad): Why it seems like everyone has come down with Facebook IPO fever: “People are realizing the extent to which technology is changing everything in modern society, and Facebook is kind of the most prominent symbol of that. I think that’s one of the reasons why this is so obsessively watched.” A chicken in every pot, a Facebook stock in every portfolio? It could happen: “There may be a surprising number of new investors who buy shares in Facebook and were not stock investors previously. Whether that might make them more willing to buy other kinds of stocks, I don’t know. Frankly I doubt it. But I think that a lot of ordinary people who are likely to buy Facebook stock are people who are going to do it because they love Facebook so much. And they’re not just Americans, they’re people all over the world. …The thing about Facebook is it has more passionate users than any product I’ve ever heard of. And that is an odd thing for a public company, and it could mean it’s a very widely held stock.” Why Zuck stayed home in California: “I think it was in order to symbolically say, things aren’t going to be that different we’re going to stick to our knitting. That’s why they had a hackathon last night. It was very symbolically chosen… it’s the same thing as wearing the hoodie to the investor presentation.” How Facebook’s IPO could finally make jeans and hoodies acceptable in business, once and for all: “I think business in general is stuffy, and slow-moving, and needs a jolt of Red Bull, really. I don’t know why businesspeople always have to wear suits — it’s stupid, it’s idiotic, it doesn’t even look good, and it’s not very contemporary. …If Facebook continues to retain this degree of prominence in the market economy, I think it will begin to have an influence that the CEO of that company doesn’t wear a suit.”

Zuckerberg Gets His Own...

If only Facebook IPO day were a little less of a snoozefest than it is now. If only it had Zuckerberg impaling investors while riding a bull rampaging through a city. Or an elevator to space. Or Zuckerberg bouncing Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar off a giant scale. But sadly, our surrealist dreams will never be realized. We will just have to settle for the ho-hum performance of Facebook’s shares so far . In the meantime, you can watch this re-enactment from NMA TV or Next Media Animation, that Taiwanese animation subsidiary that riffs off current events with 3D animated videos that look like what the lovechild of Salvador Dali and Reddit would make. Oh, and did we mention that their parent company invests in tech startups too ?