Business

Different Social Circles

The difference in income trajectory of the two most well known social networks is pretty stunning. After a few rocky initial quarters as a public company, Facebook has taken off from a revenue perspective. While on the other end, Twitter is digging a bigger hole for itself and is trending the wrong way.

During this year’s first quarter, which Twitter reported today, the company lost $162 million despite bringing in $436 million in revenue. Since its IPO in late 2013, it has lost a cumulative $1.25 billion over six quarters.

Source: Twitter has lost more than $1 billion since it went public – Quartz

Start It Up

If you are a podcast listener, here is one to add to your listening queue.

At one point in the not too distant past, Alex Blumburg was a producer at NPR and was intimately involved in argueably the two best programs on the NPR show list – This American Life and Planet Money (Six years on, the TAL podcast that Blumberg and Ira Glass produced – “The Giant Pool of Money” – about the 2008 financial crisis still resonates with me).

Blumburg recently left NPR to venture into the great blue yonder of starting a business – only he’s producing a podcast series that is documenting his successes, failures, and challenges along the way as he tries to build his company and business.

So if you are in a start up, thinking about starting up a business, or just need some new programming to listen to on your commute to and from your cubicle job, take a listen to the Start Up podcast. The RSS feed of the podcast is here and you can just copy and paste the URL into any Podcast player (I’m a big fan of Marco Arment’s Overcast in the iTunes Store)

Source: Start Up.

Cheap Greedy Owners

In case you have not heard, there have been some issues with the NFL referees through the first few weeks of the season because the NFL owners and the Refs can not come to an agreement over a contract.

The uproar over the debacle that was the Seahawks – Packers game on Monday night brought this to a national stage, where even the ladies from The View discussed it.

The NFL is big, big business to the tune of billions of dollars. So what is the sticking point over this negotiation between the NFL owners and the Refs?

The officials work about 36 hours a week — nearly full time — and pension benefits have become an important issue to them. It would probably cost each team about $100,000 to settle the pension issue.

The NFL rakes in billions and the cost to each team to come to agreement with the Refs and end this football nightmare is $100K per team (or a grand total of $3.2 Million)?!? In the context of the NFL, this is a rounding error. The $100K per team impact equates to 1/10 of 1% of Larry Fitzgerald’s 8 year contract with Arizona or Peyton Manning’s contract with Denver. $100K a year per team is probably what each spends on washing the player’s jock straps and towels.

And these jokers can’t figure out a solution? Yes, maybe Roger Goodell should be fired.

iPhone Monster

Apple’s iPhone represents about half of their $12.3 Billion in revenue. And while the iPad numbers flattened off in Q1, I would argue that a big reason for that was the impending release of iPad 2 coupled with the inventory issues that hampered iPad 2 sales. None the less, its pretty crazy to look at this graph and think that the iPhone was only released in 2006 and now represents such a huge element of Apple’s business. Amazing.

via Business Insider

Powerful Research

eBay today announced an amazing new premium feature that will enable its premium customers to research product prices of items recently sold on eBay over the past few months. The implications of this are quite profound as it will provide some amazing insight into what is the true value of items that auctioneers are selling.

Minipreneurs

From the site Trendsetters, they recently published a very interesting and resourceful article on Minipreneurs, which they tout as an emerging consumer/business trend related to individuals developing new business ideas “on the side”, using all the vast resources that are available on the Internet these days.

The article does a really nice job of highlighting some very interesting, and in some cases, brilliantly designed resources that people can use to start a business either as a full time gig or “on the side”. Obviously, the concept of people venturing out on their own to start a business is not new. But I think what they are trying to highlight is that people are still keeping their “day jobs” and on the weekends, at night, or anytime in-between, they are trying to make “that idea” they had a multi-million dollar business or just tapping into places like eBay to make some additional cash.