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?
Xuqa is a sort of social experiment game idea thing. Looks weirdly interesting. 
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
