Filed under: Microblogging
Keep hype alive : Twitter raises more pocket change
Twitter -- everyone's favorite plucky little micro-blogging service -- is making room in the bank for another $50 Million dollars in venture capital money. In and of itself, that's not all too surprising. What is shocking -- utterly mind blowing in fact -- is the valuation at which Twitter raised all that new scratch. In case you're unfamiliar with venture capital, valuation and all this money raising mumbo-jumbo --and, I wouldn't blame you if you were -- let's look at what that $50 million means. When VCs buy in, they're taking a chunk of ownership for a price. If you had a company and I gave you $100 for 1% ownership, your valuation -- what we agree the company is worth -- would be $10,000 (100% times $100). Twitter's one billion dollar valuation means that 1% of the company has an agreed value of ten million dollars.
Big deal right? Twitter is *hot*. Why am I hating on Twitter for raising some ducats, you ask? Well, I'm as big a fan of Twitter as the next guy. Heck, I even got engaged on Twitter. But a billion dollars is a whole lotta dough.
One billion dollars is:
- 9,607 - 2009 Mercedes S550 4Matic AMG Sedans (A new one each day for 26 years)
- One quarter of Marvel Comics (Disney just paid $4 billion to purchase Marvel)
- One year of health insurance for 308,000 people.
- The average yearly U.S. tax liability of over 100,000 people.
- Enough to buy 1,428,571,428 people a soda
- Or 285,714,285 of your closest friends a happy-hour beer.
Certainly anyone pulling such giant purse strings must have done their research. Is there any possibility that Twitter is actually -- or will ever be -- worth this much?
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
